Plantronics 'Win a Trip to Space' Sweepstakes plus Commercial Launcher Status

[Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI,

"Win a Trip to Space"
Plantronics
http://www.plantronics.com/north_america/en_US/winatriptospace/index

: Grand Prize

: A trip to space. Really! Be one of the first space tourists to revel
: in this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

: Since the early stages of space travel, our headsets have traveled
: with astronauts to the stars. Now we'd like to give you a chance to
: travel into space. The Plantronics To Space and Beyond promotion
: will be sending one lucky traveler on one of the first commercial
: flights into space. For your chance to win, enter today.

: Our Heritage

: In 1961 a pilot from Santa Cruz, California had an idea and eight
: years later that same idea would carry the historic first words
: from the moon: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for
: mankind." The idea was a lightweight communications headset.

: Originally designed for use by airline pilots as an alternative to
: the bulky headphones of the day, the lightweight design soon caught
: the eye of NASA. Beginning with the final two Mercury flights,
: Plantronics headsets were used exclusively by the crews of the
: Gemini and Apollo programs, including all the lunar missions, as
: well as on the ground by mission controllers.

: Other mission-critical customers soon took note. In the mid '60s,
: the Federal Aviation Agency selected Plantronics as the sole
: supplier of headsets for air traffic controllers, a privilege
: Plantronics still holds today. And in a critical milestone for the
: company, Plantronics was soon selected to supply headsets to the
: operators of the Bell Telephone company.

: Today, headsets have become mainstream, and Plantronics provides a
: wide range of products from mission-critical and business-critical
: applications to personal communications and entertainment. In the
: office, Plantronics is leading a wireless revolution with products
: that deliver unprecedented freedom and mobility to take your
: conversations further. From outer space to office space,
: Plantronics headsets set the standard.

-----------------

"X Prize Veterans Work on Next Space Steps
- ‘X+1’ symposium celebrates prize's legacy and looks to future"
MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9615023

: A year and two days after the world's first privately developed
: spaceship won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, leaders of the
: "personal spaceflight revolution" regrouped here on Thursday to
: reflect on the past and future course of their infant industry.

: Several veterans of the X Prize competition said they hoped to
: match SpaceShipOne's prize-winning feat by the end of next year.
: Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic, the British company that is bankrolling
: the construction of a fleet of SpaceShipTwos, hinted that it may
: soon announce new twists in its space travel plans.

: Although the details for future plans are still vague, one message
: came through loud and clear: The "giggle factor" that often dogged
: the space tourism industry in the pre-SpaceShipOne era is gone
: forever. "Now the idea of personal spaceflight can come out of the
: closet," Michael Kelly, vice president of the X Prize Foundation,
: told an audience of more than 200 at New Mexico State University
: here.

: Thursday's symposium represented the kickoff for the Countdown to
: the X Prize Cup, an exposition that comes to a climax on Sunday
: with demonstration flights of rocket ships and displays of rocket
: hardware and mockups. The event was organized by the X Prize
: Foundation to build on last year's momentum.

: Despite SpaceShipOne's success, space travel entrepreneurs still
: have some tough challenges ahead — and not necessarily
: technological ones, said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace
: in Mojave, Calif.

: "We don't know how to make spaceships that can fly a couple of
: times a day, every day for years," he said. "We don't know how to
: fly so safely and so reliably that we can fly people as a business.
: We don't know how to make money yet. ... If we're ever going to
: free ourselves from the kinds of fits and starts, one spurt of
: energy per generation, little incremental bits of progress that
: characterize government funding in space, we've got to start making
: a profit. And we don't know how to do that yet. We don't know any
: of those things. But we think we have pretty good ideas about how
: to solve them, and we aren't the only ones."

: A similar partnership, called the Spaceship Company, has been
: formed by Rutan's Scaled Composites and British tycoon Richard
: Branson's Virgin Galactic. They plan to build a fleet of five
: seven-passenger "SpaceShipTwo" spacecraft using SpaceShipOne
: technology.

: The Spaceship Company team is still widely considered the leader in
: the post-X Prize space race for commercial space tourism; Virgin
: Galactic is aiming to begin commercial service in the 2008 time
: frame.

: A mockup of the SpaceShipTwo craft is already being fine-tuned at
: Scaled Composites, and engineers are nailing down issues such as
: the placement of windows and seats, said Alex Tai, Virgin
: Galactic's vice president for operations.

: Tai said Rutan and Branson were both intimately involved with the
: craft's design. He said one time when he asked Rutan how the work
: was going, the inventor replied: "It was all going fine, but
: Richard called up, and he wants more seats." Tai later told
: MSNBC.com that the Spaceship Company has not yet announced a change
: in the spaceships' seating capacity.

: Tai told the audience of rocket entrepreneurs and enthusiasts at
: Thursday's symposium that Virgin Galactic wasn't necessarily locked
: into using SpaceShipOne design exclusively, just as the Virgin
: Atlantic airline isn't locked into using a specific kind of
: airplane.

: "We want to partner with all of the people in this industry. ... If
: you have a better spaceship than Burt Rutan, then Virgin Galactic
: wants to operate that spaceship," Tai said.

: At Thursday's symposium, Da Vinci team leader Brian Feeney said his
: timetable now called for a balloon-launched spaceflight by the end
: of next year — setting the stage for commercial flights.

: He also said he was speaking with potential partners in Las Vegas,
: Dubai and Japan about creating a global "mission control center"
: that would follow suborbital flights and serve as a tourist
: destination.

: However, Feeney acknowledged that his funding from the Golden
: Palace Internet casino had run out. "We're back in financing mode,
: and that will determine how we will progress," he said.

: Meanwhile, another former X Prize contender — Oklahoma-based
: Rocketplane Inc. — is in the process of building its suborbital
: spaceship, a jet that is being modified with rocket engines for the
: boost to space.

: "There's hardware on the floor, all kinds of engineering going on
: in our facilities in Oklahoma," said Chuck Lauer, Rocketplane's
: vice president of business development. "Our rollout is fall of
: '06, we are looking at actually flying our real space plane here at
: X Prize Cup 2006. Starting at the end of 2006, or 2007, our
: intention is to be minting lots of civilian astronaut wings for
: everybody that's climbing into our vehicle."

: XCOR Aerospace sat out the X Prize race, but it's due to benefit
: from the second wave of the commercial space race with a contract
: from the nascent Rocket Racing League to design a set of rocket-
: powered "X-Racers" for NASCAR-style aerial competitions. XCOR's
: Greason declined to go into detail about his company's role, but
: the league has said the planes would be based on an airframe from
: Velocity Aircraft of Sebastian, Fla.

: The X-Racers are not meant to go to the edge of outer space
: — defined as an altitude of 100 kilometers or 62 miles. But another
: XCOR project, to develop a suborbital spacecraft known as the
: Xerus, has received enough investor funding to move ahead after
: more than a year in limbo, Greason said.

: "We are off the back burner [with the Xerus project], but we don't
: have enough money that I can confidently say we can finish working
: on the vehicle," Greason told MSNBC.com.

: Another venture, Transformational Space, is hoping government
: contracts will provide the millions of dollars needed to develop an
: air-launched craft that could be used later to take paying
: passengers on orbital trips to the international space station.

: T/Space's president, David Gump, said he was waiting for word from
: NASA about a program that would fund the development of alternate
: delivery vehicles for station-bound cargo and crew. T/Space's
: proposed system for piloted missions, known as the Crew Transfer
: Vehicle or CXV, would build upon a concept that was originally
: drawn up for the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research
: Projects Agency.

: Gump said the CXV system could bring the cost of sending a four-
: person crew into orbit down to $20 million per flight — which is
: even less than the estimated $65 million cost of a Russian Soyuz
: launch. If the system becomes a reality, that could bring orbital
: flights within reach of tens of thousands of would-be fliers, Gump
: said.

: "Personal spaceflight is the hammer that will drive down the cost
: of everything else we want to do in space," he said.

: On the other end of the scale, High Altitude Research Corp. is
: developing a "sub-suborbital" launch system that would send
: payloads and perhaps eventually people to altitudes in the
: 10,000- to 100,000-foot range, said Don Robinson, president of the
: Huntsville, Ala.-based company.

: The craft would give customers a chance to have personal items or
: experiments flown on a rocket ride, and provide a great show in the
: process.

: "It seems like a smaller plan," Robinson acknowledged, "and it is a
: smaller plan, but sometimes we need to crawl before we can walk."

--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

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