Rocketeers on Bloomberg radio, in Air & Space mag

There's a transcript and a nice write-up of an interview I gave Bloomberg Radio recently at bloomberg.com. I talked with Robin Schatz about the viability of commercial spaceflight as a business and a bit about Bigelow Aerospace and other space ventures. There's a mugshot of me there too, taken on the Bloomberg roof.

The Bloomberg headquarters in New York City is every bit as astounding as the Bigelow plant. I wish I had gotten some pictures. The lobby features soaring, multistory windows, a vast snack bar full of free food and drinks. The side areas somehow manage to convey the same open-to-the-sky feeling, stuffed as they are with TV studios, radio booths, acres of flat screen TVs streaming news feeds, and hundreds of reporters pounding away at keyboards. Doing my interview there, I had the same science-fiction-come-true feeling I had talking with Robert Bigelow as we looked out of his conference room windows at space station modules being built.

Also check out the current issue of Air & Space Smithsonian and the magazine's website for an excerpt of chapter 6 of Rocketeers, about Rocketplane.

PopSci cover story on Astrium spaceplane

The October issue of Popular Science is out, with my cover story on EADS Astrium's new tourist spaceship design.

The ship, the size of a business jet, with twin jet engines for takeoffs and landings, and a single rocket engine for the boost to space, bears more than a passing resemblance to Rocketplane Global's spaceship design.

That's no accident, as Astrium's chief technical officer Robert Lainé confirmed for my article. After looking at all the major designs being floated, including air-launch like SpaceShipOne, vertical-takeoff-and-landing like Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin's designs, the Astrium team settled on Rocketplane's jet-and-rocket hybrid concept because they felt it would be the most cost-effective to operate from multiple airports.

Astrium is a wholly owned subsidiary of the company that owns Airbus, and it is also a major contractor for the European Space Agency. The company plans to build the as-yet-unnamed spaceplane for separate owner-operators whose orders for the ship would help finance its construction.