Top 100 Space & Astronomy Blogs

Check out this nicely annotated list of space blogs (including this one) on the find-schools-online.com website.

To this list I would add at least three more important links:

Space Transport News
Clark S. Lindsey provides one-stop shopping for breaking commercial spaceflight news and commentary, updated several times a day.

Space Today
Futron analyst Jeff Foust pulls together links to space news stories each day from around the Web.

Personal Spaceflight
Another site by Foust, this one devoted to his insights on commercial manned spaceflight news.

What else are we missing?

Inside: America's Secret Weapon Lab

I was a consultant on a National Geographic Channel special on DARPA called America's Secret Weapon Lab that premiers tonight. Show time is at 9:00 p.m. If you miss it, it's also on this Saturday, December 6 at 11:00 a.m., and Thursday, December 11 at 2:00 p.m.

I got the production team in the door at DARPA, and me at the same time, by pitching myself to DARPA director Tony Tether as one-stop shopping for good publicity for the agency. Tether gave me acccess to interviews and programs at the agency, and he got not just a book about DARPA, but a TV show as well.

Until the production team, Terra Nova Television, established its own relationships at DARPA, I acted as go-between. I also advised on good projects to shoot, suggested directions the show should go in and the tone it should take, provided some research help, and advised on the script.

It's a good show, and I think it represents the agency well. The focus, naturally for a television production, is on DARPA projects that are photogenic, including hypsersonic aircraft, exoskeletons, a novel swim flipper called Power Swim, and a rocket powered grenade stopper called Iron Curtain, among others.

In addition to some great footage of all that, the show includes interviews with DARPA director Tony Tether and many of the agency's program managers.

One piece of Tether's interview that did not make it into the final cut, though I pushed for it, was a wonderful moment when Tether asked anyone who had an idea for a DARPA project to email him directly at tony.tether@darpa.mil. He promised he would make sure any ideas sent to him would be considered. Great stuff, and a perfect summation of what the agency is all about.

XCOR Suborbital Tickets on Sale Now

I've just telecommuted in to a press conference in Los Angeles at which principals from XCOR Aerospace and Rocketship Tours announced that tickets for XCOR's rocketship-in-development are on sale now. Danish investment banker Per Wimmer also ceremoniously signed his consent form and was presented a giant first ticket, making him officially Passenger Number One.

Veteran travel entreprenour Jules Klar, credited with popularizing European travel for Americans in the 1960s, was introduced as the head of Rocketship Tours. "I did an enormous amount of due diligeance," said Klar of his decision to select XCOR as his rocketship provider of choice. He cited XCOR's 3,500 successful rocket firings since 2000 and the company's unmarred safety record as factors in his decision.

For their $95,000 ticket price, says Klar, passengers will get a "complete and total experience," not just the 1/2-hour run to space and back in XCOR's planned Lynx vehicle. After some basic physical and mental screening, said Klar, spaceflight participants will enjoy a 5-night stay at the Sanctuary Camelback Mountain Resort in Arizona, where they will start training that will at some point include acrobatic airplane flights.

Former Space Shuttle commander and XCOR chief test pilot Rick Searfoss will fly the two-seat Lynx to suborbital space with one passenger at a time. The passenger will sit right beside Searfoss in the cockpit to get the best possible view. That view from space, said Searfoss at the conference, is "virtually a spiritual experience." He called the view the best part of the experience, in fact, easily beating out the experience of going weightless.

Lynx passengers won't get much of a sensation of weightlessness anyway, since they'll be strapped into their seats the whole time, in contrast to the planned Virgin Galactic experience, which will include floating about the cabin of an 8-place spaceship. At $200,000 a ticket, the Virgin experience also costs twice as much.

XCOR chief Jeff Greason gave an update on his company's progress in building the Lynx. With design work completed earlier this year, the engineers and technicians at XCOR have started building the ship in their shop in Mojave, California, with first prototype engine "very shortly" to be put on the test stand. The company aims to fly the first test flight in 2010, with Wimmer to get his ride in 2011, if all goes well.

Want to ride? You can make a deposit and get on the passenger list for $20,000. Pay the full $95,000 up front to get priority seating. Call 888-778-6877 or visit the Rocketship Tours website for more info.