Hopefully Virgin Galactic can get a truly non-bias journalist into space for the first time without a major disaster. CNN Journalist Miles O’Brien was working as the network’s space correspondent while his employer was working a secret backroom deal to get him a ride on a shuttle mission back in 2003. Now there’s a conflict of interest if I ever saw it. This was NASA’s second attempt to put an American journalist into space. The first attempt was halted by the Challenger disaster in 1986.
All of the ethical concerns of NASA sending a journalist into space should be over within the next three years since there will be plenty of space flight seats for those with the cash. Virgin Galactic plans to build commercial space craft that they claim will be ready for flight in 2008. All you need is a $20k down payment on the $200k price tag for a seat on one of the first commercial space flights already being booked by Virgin Galactic. The Virgin Galactic web site has a place to sign up here if you have the cash.
The Virgin Galactic web site says:
Virgin Galactic is a company established by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group to undertake the challenge of developing space tourism for everybody.
Virgin Galactic will own and operate privately built spaceships, modelled on the history-making SpaceShipOne craft. These spaceships will allow affordable sub-orbital space tourism for the first time in our history…
The grand entrance of SpaceShipOne to AirVenture was the opening act to the announcement of this new service. Virgin Group’s Branson and SpaceShipOne builder Burt Rutan to form The Spaceship Company that will build the new commercial spaceships.
Space.com wrote on 7/27:
The announcement was made today at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s (EAA) AirVenture gathering being held July 25-31 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The yearly event spotlights homebuilt aircraft, antiques, classics, warbirds, ultralights, rotorcraft—as well as the emerging commercial spaceflight business.
This news comes only a week after the story broke about CNN journalist Miles O’Brien who reports that he nearly missed a chance to be the first American journalist in space. O’Brien was reporting on NASA operations in 2003 when the Columbia shuttle broke up on reentry. The day of the disaster obviously hit home with him according to a July 22, 2005 The San Diego Union-Tribune article that said:
His wife showed up at the studio and cried when she saw him. O’Brien told her to go home. He didn’t need the distraction.
That was pretty insensitive to say the least.
