Well, Toronto’s da Vinci Project just announced it will launch October 2, three days after Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne. But the most amazing part of the story to me — setting aside the fact there’s a guy who’s going to climb onto a largely untested launch system and try to go to space — is the sponsorship: GoldenPalace.com, an online casino which operates from an Indian reservation near Montreal, pumped in several hundred thousand dollars to make this thing happen. Their angle: They get to be the first casino in space. In fact, they’re going to give da Vinci Project astronaut Brian Feeney a laptop so he can gamble online while he’s up there. More details later.
Update: Wired News posted my story (which was filed before I wrote the message above, by the way) by noon PDT, which actually made it competitive with Space.com, MSNBC, and other outlets. Yay.