Virgin making news in the Middle East

While Planetary Resources and SpaceX have been getting all the attention in the last couple of weeks given the former’s announcement of its asteroid mining plans and the latter’s upcoming test flight to the ISS, Virgin Galactic has been active as well. Those announcements, interestingly, have been concentrated in the United Arab Emirates, the home of one of the venture’s major investors and potential future operating location for the company.
On April 17, Virgin announced it had hired Steve Landeene as its chief advisor for “Spaceport Aub Dhabi”. Landeene will be responsible for “developing a roadmap”, as the company put it, for a future spaceport in the emirate, although with no specific timeframe for its development. Abu Dhabi is home to Aabar Investments, which took an approximately one-third stake in Virgin in 2009 and gained regional rights for Virgin Galactic operations. Landeene had been executive director of Spaceport America from 2007 to 2010, although he resigned in April 2010 under something of a cloud about a land deal he was involved with near the spaceport.
Last Thursday the Wall Street Journal (via Zawya Dow Jones) reported from Doha, Qatar, that SpaceShipTwo engine development was nearly complete. “Within a month or ...