NEW YORK--Google co-founder Sergey Brin has put down a $5 million deposit to book a flight into space with the space tourism company Space Adventures.
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder
(Credit: Google)The company announced Wednesday that Brin will be the founding member of its Orbital Mission Explorers Circle, a group of six individuals who will each make a $5 million down payment to book a seat on a future orbital space flight.
Google and its co-founder Brin have long support space exploration. The company has sponsored the Google Lunar X Prize, a $25 million competition to land an unmanned craft on the moon.
"I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space," Brin said in a statement.
Space Adventures' new club was formed to help kick-start a new effort by the company to fund its own rockets and missions to the International Space Station. Previously, Space Adventures, which has been around for 10 years, has bought seats aboard already scheduled Russian missions to the International Space Station for its clients. Now it will build its own rocket for its own missions. The inaugural flight with its own Russian-built Soyuz rocket is scheduled for 2011, Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, said at a press conference here Wednesday.
The company plans to launch one mission to the International Space Station per year after 2011. Eventually it hopes to allow its wealthy clients to take space walks while in orbit or even go to the moon.
Google's Brin, who has not announced when he plans to take his trip into space, could wait to schedule his trip when those options are available.
"It's entirely up to him," said Anderson. "When he chooses a date is when he will go. It could be in three years or it could be in five."
Even if Brin isn't on Space Adventures' first privately funded flight, it's likely that at least one of the two seats available will go to a yet-unnamed member of its Orbital Mission Explorers Circle.
The $5 million deposit made by the group's members will be credited to the cost of a future space flight and help fund the program. The exact cost of each trip will vary depending on when the flight is taken and the duration of the mission, Anderson said.
Space Adventures has already sent five individuals into space with trips costing between $20 million and $40 million. Anderson said future trips aboard its own Soyuz rocket are expected to cost more.
Richard Garriott talks about his scheduled flight into space at the Space Adventures press conference.
(Credit: Marguerite Reardon/CNET Networks)Space Adventures has seats reserved for flights to the space station this October and April 2009. Richard Garriott, a well known computer game developer, will be on the October trip. Garriott paid $35 million for his seat.
Garriott's father Owen Garriott was a NASA astronaut, who spent 60 days aboard Skylab in 1973 and 10 days aboard Spacelab-1 in 1983. And Richard Garriott will be the first second generation astronaut to make it into space. Garriott has been training for his trip at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia since earlier this year and he has been keeping a blog of efforts here.
The EZ210
(Credit: RCA)The latest iteration of RCA's Small Wonder video cameras is now available. Along with Creative's just-released $99 Vado, the new trio of Small Wonders is competing with Flip Video's popular budget cams, which--by some estimates--have snagged up to one-eighth of the overall camcorder market.
We liked how previous Small Wonder models had a flip-out LCD, and we're happy to report that two of the new models sport this feature. It's also worth noting that all the models have some form of removable memory, which means you can always carry around an extra card with you to store more videos. Alas, RCA hasn't gone with a rechargeable battery--but the new models are pretty affordable. Two come in at less than $100, while the splash-resistant Traveler model comes in at $149.99.
There was some talk at CES about the EZ300HD, a Small Wonder that would allegedly shoot at "HD" resolution (1,280 x 720). However, that model hasn't materialized yet.
Here's the lineup:
... Read moreOn Sale Now: $129.99
View the latest prices for RCA Small Wonder EZ210
On Sale Now: $74.95
View the latest prices for RCA Small Wonder EZ205
On Sale Now: $89.99
View the latest prices for RCA Small Wonder EZ200
TripIt, which organizes personal travel information, expects to announce Thursday that it has raised $5.1 million in a series B round of financing from travel behemoth Sabre Holdings and German investment group European Founders Fund.
Seed investor O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which had previously put $1 million into the company, also participated in the round.
San Francisco-based TripIt, which was founded in October 2006, helps people plan trips, including flights and restaurant reservations, and then share their travel itineraries with friends and family. That the company raised millions from an old-school travel company like Sabre proves there's still room to innovate in the business, especially with the use of social-networking applications.
TripIt said it expects to use the money to further develop and market its 6-month-old service in the United States and abroad.
Tim O'Reilly, partner at O'Reilly AlphaTech, said TripIt helps manage e-mail and personal data from the Web, which can sometimes work at cross purposes. "We have so many overlapping applications, and the next frontier is getting them to work better together," he said in a statement.
Updated 1:55 p.m. PDT with no comment from Expedia.
Correction 12:45 p.m. PDT: This blog initially misstated the day the price of Expedia shares rose on rumors of a possible bid by Google. It was Tuesday.
Does Google want to buy travel site Expedia? A Wall Street analyst referred to rumors Tuesday morning that Google could make a bid and that drove up the stock of Expedia about 9 percent at one point, according to Reuters.
The rumors are just that though, at this point.
The move doesn't exactly make sense given that Google has shied away from being a company or buying companies that create content. It's likely one of the latest off-the-wall Google acquisition rumors that end up going nowhere (like the rumor a few months ago that Google was buying CNET).
But it does give a short-term boost to the company rumored to be acquired and Expedia, the largest online travel site, likely won't argue with that.
Representatives from both companies said they don't comment on rumors or speculation.
Although we saw the Lincoln MKS at its debut at the 2007 Los Angeles auto show, and again at the 2008 Detroit show, we got our first chance to get up close and personal with the navigation system during the 2008 New York auto show. Lincoln's new, big luxury cruiser not only includes Ford Sync, the system that lets you voice command your phone and MP3 player, it also has Sirius Travel Link, which gives useful information such as traffic, gas prices, weather, and movie listings.
As I sat in the back row on a cross-country US Airways flight a few nights ago, with the engine roaring outside the window, the bathroom directly behind me stinking, and unable recline my seat at all, I wondered how I could have avoided the unfortunate situation I was in.
Help is on the way in the form of InsideTrip.com, which launches in beta on Tuesday. The site not only includes JetBlue and Virgin America in its flight results, but it offers an interesting way to help you figure out the best flight taking into consideration things other than price.
For instance, it factors in number of stops, duration, and on-time statistics about the flights, as well as what the security wait time may be, how much legroom you would have, and what percentage of seats are filled. It also looks at how the flights rank for lost bags, where the gate location is, and how long you have to connect to the next flight. That would have been handy for me to know as I had to run to catch my connecting flight to San Francisco across what seemed like the entire Phoenix airport.
The site offers up a Trip Quality Rating and assigns a rating, on a 100-point scale, based on how many of the criteria are met. You can customize the criteria if you don't care about certain things, like aircraft type or aircraft age, and those factors won't be weighed in the results.
There's a fun little visual itinerary bar for the flights too, that allows you to get more details on a flight, say arrival time, by hovering the mouse over it.
There is another site called SeatGuru.com which lets you view the seating on specific airplanes so you can avoid being in the exit aisle or last row, but it doesn't offer all the other features InsideTrip.com does.
I'll definitely give InsiderTrip.com a try before I fly again. But price will still be the biggest factor, unless of course, it's a work trip.
InsideTrip.com helps you find flights based not only price, but also factors related to speed, comfort, and ease including leg room, plane size, and security wait time.
(Credit: InsideTrip.com)Beginning January 1, new Department of Transportation rules about lithium and lithium ion batteries in checked and carry-on baggage in airplanes supposedly went into effect. The announcement generated some fevered commentary at the time. This was in part because the rules were in the form of government writing commonly known as bureaucratese, leading a lot of people to think that they were far more onerous than they in fact are. (I discussed the new rules in an earlier posting.)
Well, I recently returned from a trip to California and there's no evidence that the new restrictions are being enforced in any way. No screening. No signs. No notices. Nada. When I arrived home I did some poking around on the Web and, as far as I can tell, nobody else has run across any noteworthy changes to battery screening procedures either. For example, under the new rules, loose batteries are now supposed to be placed in individual plastic bags or otherwise stored in a way that their contacts can't be shorted out. I've seen no evidence that anyone is paying any attention to this requirement.
Your mileage may vary, of course. Especially if you're transporting multiple large batteries for professional video equipment and the like (which is the sort of thing that the rule change really targeted), it may still be worth trying to get some clarification--for whatever good that will do. However, it certainly appears that the government has effectively shelved putting the new safety regulations into practice for the time being.
Does anyone have any experiences to the contrary?
It used to be that only a select few scientists could train to become an astronaut, and then even fewer were chosen to venture into space. But now, with the declining influence of NASA and the rise of the commercial space industry, seemingly every private citizen and their mother wants to go into space one day.
Life on Mars, so far visited only by robotic rovers, would be no day at the beach.
(Credit: NASA/JPL)For two students at MIT, that day is already here--in Utah. Engineering graduate students Zahra Khan and Phillip Cunio--both from MIT's department of Aeronautics and Astronautics--have set up a site in the Utah desert near Hanksville that simulates conditions on Mars. They've been living in a footlocker-sized container, wearing spacesuits, recycling their own water and eating freeze-dried food since Feb. 17.
Everything is outfitted with radio-frequency ID tags, so that their system can alert them if supplies run low or are misplaced. The two have even sent e-mail, but there's a lag of 20 minutes before it reaches the recipient. That's the time it takes for radio waves to travel to and from the Red Planet.
The goal of the project, which will last two weeks, is to develop a "smart" carrier for use in fieldwork research in remote expeditions, including planetary exploration.
"The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is an analog simulation facility. This means it's in a place that's a lot like Mars and so we pretend we're actually on Mars in order to practice living and working there," according to Cunio, who's keeping a blog on the project.
Yet it's not quite like Mars. His partner Khan aborted the mission halfway through to fly to Amsterdam for a job interview with the European Space Agency.
Find reports on the mission via the MDRS Webcam and on Cunio's blog.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Asian Law Caucus are suing the Department of Homeland Security over aggressive searches and seizures of travelers' property and information at U.S. borders.
As reported on BoingBoing:
ALC, a San Francisco-based civil rights organization, received more than 20 complaints from Northern California residents last year who said they were grilled about their families, religious practices, volunteer activities, political beliefs, or associations when returning to the United States from travels abroad. In addition, customs agents examined travelers' books, business cards collected from friends and colleagues, handwritten notes, personal photos, laptop computer files, and cell phone directories, and sometimes made copies of this information. When individuals complained, they were told, "This is the border, and you have no rights."
"When the government searches your books, peers into your computer, and demands to know your political views, it sends the message that free expression and privacy disappear at our nation's doorstep," said Shirin Sinnar, staff attorney at ALC. "The fact that so many people face these searches and questioning every time they return to the United States, not knowing why and unable to clear their names, violates basic notions of fairness and due process."
NPR's Morning Edition broadcast a segment on this story this morning. The Department of Homeland Security is vigorously defending its right to search and seize at the border, and is supported by legal precedent. The segment suggested that travelers' best option was to bring only essential information along on international trips.
I feel like ordinary American citizens are having to become like Jason Bourne, buying the cell phone, making a call and then throwing it away. A more practical suggestion may be that if you are upgrading a laptop, you may want to keep the old one in stripped-down form for travel. But it would be ironic and sad to leave the light, little MacBook Air at home on the desk while you carry a clunkier model with you.
It will be interesting to see if sensible consumer solutions to this problem spring up, and how they can be marketed without sounding "unpatriotic." Let's face it: just because we have nothing to hide doesn't mean we want to have our lives uploaded to government servers. There must be a way to create a "travel" profile on one's laptop or PDA that doesn't unnecessarily expose all of your contact information to surveillance. Some version of backing up the information before you leave, stripping the laptop to bare bones, and then restoring it after you return home.
Today was my first experience using the Clear travel service. If you are not familiar (or haven't flown lately), Clear is a service that utilizes fingerprints and/or iris scans to bypass the long lines of airport security.
Despite my leftist obsession with privacy, I decided when I first looked at the Clear program that I thought it would be better if I voluntary signed up for the service since ultimately the government and TSA can find whatever they want about you anyway. I'm also fairly convinced that's it better to have some alternate form of identity verification should something go wrong.
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