Here at the Wirefly X Prize Cup Executive Summit in Las Cruces, New Mexico, several space notes of worth.

NASA chief, Mike Griffin, advised the Summit that the space agency is considering buying seats on future suborbital spaceships “for experiments and possibly astronaut candidate proficiency, if and when they become available.”Griffin said he’s asked colleagues in NASA’s Innovative Partnership Program to look into the prospect. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore presented a lunch time talk at the Summit. He’s not happy with the newly released Bush space policy, calling it “a move in the wrong direction” and “a very serious mistake.” Gore urged Summit listeners to analyze the policy “very carefully.”

“It has the potential, down the road, to create the kind of fuzzy thinking and chaos in our efforts to exploit the space resource as the fuzzy thinking and chaos that the Iraq policy has created for us in Iraq,” Gore explained.

For more detail on the newly issued Bush space policy, go to:

http://www.space.com/news/061007_bush_spacepolicy.html

In other volatile news, John Carmack and his fellow rocketeers at Armadillo Aerospace successfully fired up their flight hardware in a pre-Cup test for the Lunar Lander Challenge.

The rocket flight means the Armadillo team has an all-clear to fly in public at the Cup.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Space & Astronomy, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.