Suborbital

Astronauts, researchers, educators, senior government officials including the director of NASA's Ames Research Center, Dr. Pete Worden, and the head of the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation, Dr. George Nield, and representatives from commercial space companies and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, will be among the speakers at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference on February 18-20, 2010.

NASA has selected 28 undergraduate student teams to test their science experiments in simulated weightlessness. The teams were selected to fly in the summer of 2010 with NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities and Systems Engineering Educational Discovery (SEED) programs.

NASA Solicitation: Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program - CRuSR - Request for Information

"The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Innovative Partnerships Program (IPP) recently established the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program (CRuSR) Office at Ames Research Center (ARC). NASA recognizes the significant accomplishments of the commercial reusable suborbital spaceflight industry and is contemplating two significant procurement actions: 1) A potential procurement of reusable suborbital spaceflight services, and 2) a solicitation of research investigations that will utilize those commercial reusable suborbital spaceflight services. Researchers proposing to fly investigations on these vehicles will need information about the payload environment, flight profile and potential for human participation. In this Request for Information (RFI), the NASA Ames CRuSR Office is requesting technical and programmatic input to improve the government's understanding of flight opportunities to aid potential science investigators in scoping and designing possible future suborbital investigations."

Virgin Founder, Sir Richard Branson and SpaceshipOne (SS1) designer, Burt Rutan, today reveal SS2 to the public for the first time since construction of the world's first manned commercial spaceship began in 2007. SS2 has been designed to take many thousands of private astronauts into space after test programming and all required U.S. government licensing has been completed.

Update: from @rocketlabnz: "A successful launch! Lift off at 2.28pm and an exemplary 22 second burn. The team are ecstatic! NZ, thank you for all your support! --- Awaiting GPS coordinates over the Iridium network. The payload section is expected to be around 50 kilometres NE of Great Mercury Island." Launch video

Earlier release from RocketLab below:

Environmental Tectonics Corporation's (OTC Bulletin Board: ETCC - News; "ETC" or the "Company") The National AeroSpace Research and Training (NASTAR) Center announced today an international contest for students to design a patch that will commemorate NASTAR Center's newest training program for suborbital scientist-astronauts who will fly aboard commercial suborbital spaceflights. The winning design will become the Official Patch for NASTAR's Suborbital Scientist Training Program.