Rocket Lab announces three back-to-back launches for BlackSky – Spaceflight Now spaceflightnow.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spaceflightnow.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Orbite’s director of astronaut training, Brienna Rommes, enjoys a zero-G airplane flight. (Orbite Photo)
Wanna take a ride to space? There’s a smorgasbord of spaceflight shaping up for paying customers, ranging from the suborbital tours planned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to the orbital trips offered by SpaceX. What will those rides be like, and how will they differ from each other?
Starting in August, a Seattle-based startup called Orbite (pronounced “Or-beet,” French-style) will offer three-day orientation sessions to let customers sample the astronaut experience and find out for themselves.
“We’ll give them a ‘try before you buy’ experience, and educate them on the different offerings that are out there,” Orbite co-founder and CEO Jason Andrews, a veteran of Seattle’s Spaceflight Industries, told GeekWire.
Testbed for NASA moon mission rides to orbit with six other satellites – Spaceflight Now spaceflightnow.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spaceflightnow.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
An artist’s conception shows BlackSky’s Global satellites in orbit. (BlackSky Illustration)
BlackSky Holdings, which is operating a growing fleet of Earth observation satellites as well as a cloud-based platform to analyze geospatial data, says it will become a publicly traded company through a blank-check merger valued at nearly $1.5 billion.
The agreement with Osprey Technology Acquisition Corp. would result in BlackSky being listed on the NYSE with the ticker symbol “BKSY” in July.
It’s the latest chapter for a company that traces its roots to Seattle and still has roughly half of its 135-employee workforce here. The other half of the operation is based in Herndon, Va.