After the long weekend that has been the UK's spring bank holiday and America's memorial day weekend I am off to the French town of Arcachon, located on that country's Atlantic coast south of Bordeaux, for the International Academy of Astronautics' symposium on private human access to space. So expect commercial human spaceflight news and blogs from me this week and probably next week too
The image above is of the Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association's (ARCA) Stabilo launch vehicle. I forgot to include ARCA in the list of European suborbital ventures in this posting. Having had an unmanned carrier balloon test of the Stabilo-1b vehicle ARCA now plans for an end of year manned flight
But more recently ARCA has become one of the teams competing for the Google lunar X Prize and announced last week that they intend to test fly a Stabilo vehicle with a prototype of the team's "European Lunar Lander" onboard in three months time - see the video of the ARCA announcement about that in the extended portion of the post
on April 30, 2009 9:23 AM | Reply
I'm glad that the International Academy of Astronautics chose Arcachon for the 2008 Symposium. Do you know when the Symposium will again be held at Arcachon?
http://www.linkedin.com/in/russelldavison
on May 1, 2009 9:24 AM | Reply
This is the IAA's calendar, there is nothing now but usually aerospace symposiums are every 18-months so I am guessing sometime in 2010.
http://iaaweb.org/content/view/171/287/