New model, completion

We have now taken delivery of a fine model, by the space modeller, Phil Mills,  of the SF-01 vehicle for display purposes at exhibitions. It is 29cm in length and 29cm across at the stern, from wing-tip to wing-tip. It has a removable undercarriage, so it can be suspended,  or parked on its wheels.

Spacefleet Club

Next month we intend to launch the Spacefleet Club, which will give you the opportunity to assist directly in the progress of the Spacefleet Project. There will be a news letter, later to be developed into a magazine, themed merchandise, invitations to key events and sites, concessions on flights in the SF-01 and more. The primary aim of starting this club is so that we can raise enough cash to do the absolutely essential preliminary study, for which we applied for ESA support last year. If we can do that, then the results will put us in a very good position to attract the serious money for the project to build the SF-01 vehicle and manufacture three of them for sale to space tourism operators. Look for details on the club here next month.

New artwork

We are also expecting another very fine image from the artist John Ridgway in the near future, which will be of a take-off of the SF-01 vehicle. We now expect that ramp take-off will be the safest take-off method, and assuring safety of passengers and crew will always be our first consideration!

Charitable appeal

For some years, there has been a "Spacefleet Association" web site. with the aim of providing some space science and astronomy news worldwide, and also some space education. The educational part has been a bit neglected for lack of available effort, but an opportunity has now come up to help someone. Recently, two young aspiring space scientists who live in Bogota, Colombia, joined the Spacefleet Association and mentioned that they had an invitation to attend a World youth scientific conference, to take place in September this year at Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. The host organisation is "FISS", the International federation of Scientific Societies. If your Spanish is good you can read it directly, otherwise use Google to translate. click here. We have set off an appeal to collect funds to send Andres and Margarita, and their parents to the conference. The total cost is $4500 USD, and the appeal is for a $10 donation, so with only 450 donations, we can meet the target. If you are feeling charitable today, please go to the Spacefleet Association web site and press the PayPal button on the top left of the front page. We can assure you that not a cent of your donation will end up as "fees" or "expenses" or get diverted in other ways.

Spacefleet Association

We are heading towards making the Spacefleet Association, which is just a website with some subscribers at present, into a fully-constituted UK charity, which means that we can raise money by membership fees, sales or donations for activities such as that described in the previous item, and for promoting space education and international collaboration in space technology around the world. If you have any thoughts about this, please let us know.