International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight – Las Cruces, NM – October 22-23, 2008

For those of us that didn’t get to go, here’s a like to another blogger that gives a great description of the past week’s events: http://www.personalspaceflight.info/

Good evening.  I am in Las Cruces, NM at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, and I wanted to summarize some of what I have heard at the various panels on the first day, and end with some amazing words of encouragement.

During the first two sessions of the day, covering issues related to success in sub-orbital and orbital commercial space flight several common themes came up.  First and foremost was the need to ensure a much higher degree of safety in space flight (one speaker went as far as to say we should be aiming for accident rates of 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 flights).  Another theme that was interesting to hear was the importance of working with today’s technology to develop solutions we can fly today. Arianespace and XCor appeared to be particularly strong proponents of this approach.  The speaker from XCor had one more point that is of interest to Mach 30, namely that moving into manned orbital flight was too big a step for private enterprise and that the government is too focused on “hail mary” programs to make sustainable progress in routine access to space. (more…)