The media reps at XCOR Aerospace and the Rocket Racing League (RRL) have just filled me on on their plans for demo flights and presentations at the EAA AirVenture Convention at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

XCOR's engineers have been hard at work perfecting the Rocket Racing League's first X-Racer, a rocket-powered racing airplane, and now they're ready for demonstration flights at Oshkosh. Here's the schedule:

Flight 1: Tuesday, July 29, 2:30 p.m., following a 2:10 p.m. press conference

Fight 2: Friday, August 1, 2:30 p.m.

Flight 3: Saturday, August 2, 2:30 p.m.

All flights will be flown by Rick Searfoss, a former Space Shuttle commander now serving as XCOR and the RRL's chief test pilot. "And in addition," the RRL rep tells me, "the Rocket Racing League exhibit/booth on Aero Shell Square will feature the RRL simulators, games, and other great stuff for all ages."

XCOR chief engineer Dan DeLong and company president Jeff Greason will also give three separate presentations on the company's future as a commercial spaceship developer. I'm sure their spaceship-in-development, the Lynx, will feature prominently. Here's the schedule for those events:

Presentation 1: Monday, July 28, 2:30 p.m.

Presentation 2: Saturday, August 2, 1:00 p.m.

Presentation 3: Sunday, August 3, 11:30 a.m.

Labels: Oshkosh, Rocket Racing League, XCOR

Look for me on the Fox Business Network this Monday morning, July 21, at 7:30 a.m. on a breakfast show hosted by Charles Payne.

I'll be on in the studio for a few minutes to talk about the emerging commercial spaceflight industry, including news from Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace and a new edition of my book Rocketeers.

Watch this space for a link to the segment after it airs....



---Update on July 21---
Not quite as much time as I had hoped for for the segment--they seem to have been running late and had to truncate the time alloted to it.

Still, they brought in Diane Murphy, veteran space business communications executive and SpaceX's new communications director via satellite. She was in excellent form, in spite of having to appear in a Los Angeles studio at 4:00 a.m. Nice job, Diane!

Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to plug the new edition of my book Rocketeers. Watch for a post about that soon.

Labels: Fox Business Network, Michael Belfiore, SpaceX

Check out my PopSci.com report of a Space Adventures press briefing in New York City this morning. CEO Eric Anderson announced new charter flights to the International Space Station.

Labels: Eric Anderson, International Space Station, Popular Science, Soyuz, Space Adventures, Spaceflight

I'm blogging for PopSci.com from the first annual BioMass conference in Minneapolis. Latest post here.

Labels: Bio Fuels, Popular Science

Yesterday I visited a research facility in North Dakota creating jet fuel out of vegetable oil, and I've posted a report on popsci.com.

Labels: Bio Fuels, Popular Science, University of North Dakota

I've just posted my reporting on last night's 50th anniversary celebration for the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency on the Popular Science website at PopSci.com.

Labels: DARPA, Popular Science

One of the fascinating projects I'm researching for my book about DARPA is the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. I recently spoke with DARPA's program manager for the project, Army Colonel and intensive care unit doctor Geoffrey Ling, who filled me in on how the program came to be and his goals for it.

Ling was on a tour of duty in Afghanistan when he treated a young boy who'd lost an arm and a leg to a Russian land mine. That's what planted the seeds in his mind for what became Revolutionizing Prosthetics. That, and an encounter with a young American soldier in Iraq who wept when Ling told him his million-dollar wound would get him sent home.

As Ling explained it to me, the goal of his program is a "brain-controlled arm that functions at the level of capacity of an arm, that looks like an arm, that weighs like an arm, and also gives you sensory feedback just like your arm would, and we want it within four years."

The clock started ticking in 2005 and now the arm is due in 2009. The work is going on at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University. That's a prototype the group produced last year. I'll get a full update on current progress at a massive, convention-style meeting of all the participating researchers in Maryland later this month.

Meanwhile, just to hedge his bets and get something in the pipeline even faster, Ling created a two-year arm project, now finishing up work at Dean Kamen's DEKA Research (of Segway Human Transporter fame).

Ling calls this one the strap-and-go arm."You wake up in the morning, you put it on, and off you go. It doesn't require hooking up to your brain or anything like that, it's a strap-and-go arm. So we recognize that the strap-and-go arm will not be as dexterous and as functional as the brain controlled one but it needed to be a whole lot better than the hook that's available today--you know, the thing out of Peter Pan?"

I reported on DEKA's arm last year, and I'm due for an update. Ling says progress since then has been amazing. "It's a fantastic arm," says Ling. "Mike, you have to see it to believe it." I'm there.

Labels: DARPA, Revolutionizing Prosthetics