Sean O'Keefe, former head of NASA, may have been a passenger on a DeHavilland DHC-30 aircraft that crashed in a mountainous area in the Alaska wilderness Monday night as reported by CNN.

On Thursday, 2009 March 12, a tiny piece of space debris from an old rocket motor caused the three astronauts aboard the International Space Station ( ISS) to don their space suits and hustle to the attached Soyuz spacecraft just in case—just in case the 13-centimeter-diameter (about five inches wide) poked a hole in their home away from home.

Usually no means no, but not to the folks building Spaceport America, a commercial spaceport currently in development and earmarked for space tourism. In fact, Steve Landeene, executive director of the New Mexico Space Authority (NMSA), viewed the loss of a tax increase referendum in Otero County, New Mexico, that would support Spaceport America as little more than a temporary setback.

Jim Benson, 63, founder of SpaceDev, the first publicly traded space company, died October 10, 2008, from a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, with which he was diagnosed in 2007.

Sam Coniglio, contributing editor of the Space Future Journal (and the vice president of the Space Tourism Society), told the Journal that the Falcon 1 mission failed.

by Carol Pinchefsky

Three people were killed and three injured during a test of a propulsion system for Scaled Composites, the makers of SpaceShipOne and the work-in-progress, SpaceShipTwo.

MSNBC reports that the SpaceX launch of the Falcon 1 rocket scheduled for March 19, 2007, was scrubbed 62 seconds before launch. The article cited a telemetry problem, occurring perhaps when data transmission was switched from land line to radio.

by Carol Pinchefsky

According to a BBC article Daisuke Enomoto, the Japanese businessman who had planned to travel to the International Space Station, has failed his medical test.