President Bush has chosen Sean O'Keefe to be the next Nasa administrator; he’s expected to start formally early in the new year after the final Senate ratification. O’Keefe is currently Deputy Director of the US government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Earlier in 2001 he was responsible for denying Nasa the extra $5 billion that it requested (on top of a long series of earlier budget over-runs) toward the International Space Station ( ISS). A professional public sector manager, O’Keefe has said of the project “...technical excellence at any cost is not an acceptable approach....”

Los Angeles, California

According to MSNBC, Mark Burnett, the producer of “Survivor” who envisioned and realized 16 castaways duking it out for survival, like Gilligan’s Island with an edge, has made an even more daring programming decision: He plans a new “Survivor” series that will send 13 to 15 contestants to Star City, Russia. After a process of elimination, one lucky winner will be sent to Mir Space Station.

The Space Transportation Association based in Washington DC is one of the organisations putting most effort into changing official attitudes to space tourism, having been responsible for such historic steps as initiating and realising the historic NASA/STA joint study: General Public Space Travel and Tourism and holding the first space tourism conference in the USA (see below).

The Space Enterprise Symposium will take place on Saturday, November 13 at Seattle's Museum of Flight. Five speakers will discuss commercialization of the International Space Station at the day-long event, which is sponsored by the Space Frontier Foundation, the Northwest Venture Group, the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest, the Museum of Flight, and ProSpace America.