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Where are they now? Lord British, more mundanely known as Richard Garriott, is spending "the bulk of his fortune" on a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz capsule. Turns out his father, Owen Garriott, was a visitor to Skylab in 1973. While the younger Garriott wanted to be an astronaut himself, eye problems meant he didn't meet NASA's requirements.
Closer to home, renowned filker Tom Smith has suffered a devastating injury. Straight away, a fundraiser CD called Mister Smith Goes to the Hospital was made available in return for donations. You can get the electronic version at http://www.partiallyclips.com/tomsmith/. Details of the accident are available there too, but they are not for the squeamish.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has greeted the kickoff of the Google Lunar X Prize with a barrage of threatening letters asserting its exclusive rights to "actively or passively sensing the Earth's surface, including bodies of water, from space by making use of the properties of the electromagnetic waves emitted, reflected, or diffracted by the sensed objects" as granted by the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992. Legal commentators are largely of the opinion that the law was written by lobbyists for someone making money off the LANDSAT program. Anyway, just to be safe, you may want to build your lunar spaceport outside the US if you're thinking of taking holiday photos.
Meanwhile, in New York, a judgement has still not been issued in the WB-RDR lawsuit. Dare we hope that this means the parties are actually talking to each other...?
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