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The company that flew the first privately funded manned rocket into space has been cited in connection with an explosion last summer that killed three workers, the state said today. California occupational safety inspectors said in a report that Scaled Composites LLC failed to properly train workers about the dangers of nitrous oxide that was used during a test in July. The state levied three citations against Scaled, including two that were considered "serious," and fined the spaceship builder $25,870. The company has 15 days to pay or appeal. Three workers died and three were seriously injured in the explosion...

CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL SAYS ONE PERSON KILLED, ONE INJURED IN CRASH OF VIRGIN GALACTIC SPACECRAFT IN MOJAVE DESERT -CNN, CNBC This is a breaking news story. Please check back for further updates. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Oct 31 (Reuters) - A suborbital passenger spaceship being developed by Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic crashed during a test flight on Friday at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, officials said. Two pilots were aboard the spaceship, which was undergoing its first powered test flight since January. It was not immediately known if they were able to parachute to safety. More than 800...

Thrill-seeking billionaire Richard Branson has reached space aboard his own winged rocket ship in his boldest adventure yet. The feat vaults the nearly 71-year-old Branson past fellow billionaire and rival Jeff Bezos, who is planning to fly to space in a craft of his own nine days from now. With about 500 people watching, including Branson’s wife, children and grandchildren, a twin-fuselage aircraft with his space plane attached underneath took off in the first stage of the flight. Aboard were Branson and five crewmates from his Virgin Galactic space-tourism company.

Inspired by Apple CEO Tim Cook, Virgin founder Richard Branson has taken to his blog to say that businesses should begin standing up against climate change deniers. "While Tim told sustainability skeptics to 'get out of our stock,'" Branson writes, "I would urge climate change deniers to get out of our way." Cook's statements came at a recent shareholders meeting, where he soundly shot down a proposal rooted in climate change denial that would have had Apple putting its bottom line above its interests in sustainability. Cook said that those who would prefer Apple do everything purely for profit simply...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - VindicatedPosted By Robert Spencer On May 16, 2014 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments Victory is at hand! All the freedom-lovers who have been assailed for years with claims that their opposition to jihad mass murder, Islamic supremacism, and Islamically-justified wife-beating, female genital mutilation, honor killing, stoning for adultery, amputation for theft, devaluation of women’s testimony, and all the rest of it constituted “racism,” “bigotry,” and “hatred” can now come in from the cold. As hard as it is to believe, opposing jihad terror and Sharia are now “in.” Everybody’s getting in on it.Fox News reported last week that the Beverly...

Defence giant BAE Systems to buy a stake in Britain's Reaction Engines, which is developing revolutionary SABRE engines for ultra-fast aircraft How an aircraft fitted with the SABRE engines might look ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hypersonic air travel and cut-price satellite launches will move a step closer when BAE Systems buys a stake in a UK company developing engines able to power aircraft at 2,500mph and into space. The FTSE 100 group is set to purchase 20pc of Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines for £20.6m, in a deal that will see the defence giant’s expertise applied to research on the privately-held company’s engine, which combines...

You may recall that back in the early years of the Age of Obama NASA decided to go in a new direction. No longer satisfied with their mission to explore space, they decided to pursue the much sexier goal of promoting Muslim self esteem - because nothing is as important as self esteem.Since NASA was exiting the rocket business in order to set up a public relations agency, they subcontracted the outer space division to private investors handpicked by bureaucrats. Alas, CHANGE is difficult and the NASA switch proved to be no exception; our outsourced space program has recently experienced...

Ever since the Obama administration’s rollout of its space policy two and a half years ago, conventional ideological wisdom has been turned on its head. An administration that had seemed eager to increase government involvement in everything from auto companies to health care proposed a more competitive, privatized approach to spaceflight, and people claiming to be conservatives blasted it, demanding that the traditional (and failing) NASA monopoly continue. Jim Muncy, a former aide on space policy to California congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R.), put it cleverly: “Democrats don’t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don’t think it...

As a former NASA executive, I am saddened by the media response to Newt Gingrich's proposal that we return to the moon. The mockery and ridicule does America a great disservice. Space exploration and development is an important national issue. It's not only possible and necessary to safeguard our future—it can be a lot cheaper than anybody dreams.

Summer 2004 The Path Not Taken Rand Simberg n June 21, 2004, with thousands in attendance in the small southern California desert town of Mojave, a sexagenarian test pilot performed the first trip to space in a privately-built spacecraft. SpaceShipOne, as it is called, cost less than $30 million and was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Occurring seventeen months after the loss of the shuttle Columbia put America’s manned space program on hiatus, the SpaceShipOne flight received a surprising amount of publicity. The achievement, while impressive, was also limited: SpaceShipOne’s flight was only a suborbital test, roughly the equivalent...

AFTER the destruction of America’s Columbia space shuttle three years ago, the final frontier was in danger of becoming a frontier too far. The shuttle programme began to be wound down, aspirations for the International Space Station were scaled back and scientific projects such as the Hubble telescope were decommissioned. However, beyond the shuttle, space is a booming market and, for the first time, much of the drive is coming from the private sector. The multibillion-dollar satellite business continues to be very important to companies including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and EADS, which builds the Ariane rocket. Russia, China and Japan...

Space tourism is less than three years away, Sir Richard Branson has claimed. There are already 13,500 potential passengers for the £100,000 ($190,000) "Virgin Galactic spaceliner" trip, Sir Richard told the BBC. The entrepreneur is having five "spaceliners" built in the US by the team which launched the SpaceShipOne rocket plane last year.

One small step for space tourism... If plans for a new range of suborbital vehicles get off the drawing board, then holidays in space could get off the ground In the past year, a lot has changed in the field of human spaceflight. In January, President George Bush brushed aside the fact that America's entire space-shuttle fleet was grounded when he announced grandiose plans to put people back on the moon, and then to launch a manned mission to Mars. In June, Burt Rutan, an American aeronautical engineer, showed that human spaceflight was no longer the preserve of governments by...

New photos reveal mammoth structure of Paul Allen’s six-engine Stratolaunch Feb 24, 2015, 12:26pm PST Updated: Feb 24, 2015, 4:03pm PST   View Photos KGET image One of the Stratolaunch's twin carbon composite hulls, nearly done.   Steve Wilhelm Paul Allen's giant satellite launch plane, called Stratolaunch, has been kept mostly under wraps since the project began – or at least as much under wraps as you can keep something with a 380-foot wingspan.But now, new images from a California television station have revealed some interesting details about the aircraft.Stratolaunch is Allen's bid to compete in launching satellites into...

... He said: "We would love to finish what we started some years ago and I think pretty well all our astronauts would love us to finish and would love to go into space. "I think millions of people in the world would one day love the chance to go to space and this is the start of a long programme."

Virgin Galactic is reporting that there has been an "in-flight anomaly" aboard SpaceShip Two. There are unconfirmed reports that one of the two pilots is dead.

Virgin Galactic said its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane suffered an "in-flight anomaly" during a powered test flight on Friday that resulted in the loss of the aircraft. #SpaceShipTwo has experienced an in-flight anomaly. Additional info and statement forthcoming. — Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) October

Burt Rutan - aviation pioneer, engineer, test pilot, climate skeptic. Note the car. Recently after some conversations with a former chemical engineer who provided me with some insight, I’ve come to the conclusion that many engineers have difficulty with many of the premises of AGW theory because in their “this has to work or people die” world of exacting standards, the AGW argument doesn’t hold up well by their standards of performance. Today I was surprised to learn that one of the foremost and world famous engineers on the planet, Burt Rutan, has become an active climate skeptic. You...

MOJAVE, Calif. (AP) -- A company working to send tourists on suborbital flights says it has tested its spacecraft with a crew for the first time. Virgin Galactic says the craft remained attached to a specially designed airplane throughout a six-hour flight over California's Mojave desert Thursday....

OSHKOSH (WKOW) -- The new, mothership for Sr Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceship will make several low passes upon arrival at Oshkosh to open the Airventure Airshow on Monday afternoon, July 27. It will be the aircraft's first public appearance. The White Knight Two is the aircraft that will carry Branson's commercial spacecraft to a high altitude before releasing it for a launch into suborbital space.