best of the holiday season - New Space

Hobbyspace.com had a series of posts about:

Mojave air and space port resolving its licence difficulties after energetic materials storage and handling dispute with the FAA

Spaceport Kiruna developments and methane thruster work

Rocketplane XP info

a link to an Holman Jenkins op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he promotes private spaceflight development

Spaceport America funding

Wallop island spaceport progress

And an update on the European space tourism programme called Project Enterprise

NASAWatch.com picked up on the report that Russia's head of its space agency said tourist flights to the space station were unlikely from 2009 - an ESA official told me this was the case back in early December and I am now waiting for Space Adventures to clarify its position on this

Personal Spaceflight picked up on the same newswire article and also reported that an almost forgotten commercial spaceflight company had reappeared while famous UK insurer Lloyd's of London had nice thiongs to say about commercial human spaceflight

The Spaceports blogs looks at the prospects for 2008

Spacedev announced that it had tethered/guide wires test of its hybrid rocket powered “lander” and the video for that can be found here

And finally, Two Guys and a Van (TGV) unveiled new info about its rocket engine