Showing posts with label space tourism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space tourism. Show all posts

Friday, September 26, 2008

Travelography #128: Economy + Environment Stall Cruise Lines

Use the players on this page, or click the title above to listen to this podcast.

Stories discussed in this podcast are from the Travelography Twitter Blog for the week of 22 September 2008. This podcast is also available at Blubrry.com and Travelgeography.info.


Analyst cuts Carnival rating to "Sell"

... $100 a barrel oil and rising shipbuilding costs require the industry to focus on improving returns by raising cruise prices and cutting commissions to travel agents. ... Carnival's $10 billion in ship orders means that the company cannot make this shift for at least four years.

Regulators cite nearly half of the 20 ships that regularly discharge in Alaska waters


Six Princess Cruises ships, a Norwegian Cruise Line ship and a Regent Seven Seas Cruises ship were cited for exceeding limits on wastewater pollution. Last week, a Holland America cruise ship was cited. The state Department of Environmental Conservation has not yet dealt with samples from August and September, and may find more violations.


"How would people of New York feel if they decided to move the Statue of Liberty to China?'' says Karin Noedgaard, the People's Party spokeswoman on cultural affairs. ``This is a catastrophic idea.''

Grounded space tourist wants $21 million refund

Enomoto alleges he was pulled from the flight so Ansari, who had invested in Space Adventures, could fly instead. Ansari also was the primary backer of the $10 million Ansari X Prize awarded in 2004 for the first privately developed manned space flight. In a response filed on Wednesday, Space Adventures' lawyers said Enomoto's contract did not entitle him to a refund if he became medically disqualified.

Plane crazy? New airline launched

Jet Republic bosses are putting their trust in the ultra-rich avoiding the turbulence from the credit crunch as they launch their new luxury service. The company has placed an order worth around £830m for 110 Learjet aircraft, each seating seven passengers. The airline will fly to more than 1,000 airports in Europe, including the UK, from its base in Lisbon, Portugal.

With Economy in Crisis Mode, Leaders Gather at The Lodging Conference

...the next major trend to hit the lodging industry will be green hotels. That trend is being driven to a great extent by increasing energy prices. “In some islands of the Caribbean, energy prices have doubled since last year,” ... “As brands, we need to start requiring green changes.” “In many future developments, you will see more solar and wind technologies,


Monday, August 20, 2007

Travelography #86: Space Tourism Accident + UNESCO World Heritiage Issues

This is a PCN Travelography Podcast related post This is a PCN Travelography Podcast related post. Use the players on this page, or click the title above to listen to this podcast.

Rocket accident shows dangers of space tourism. UNESCO considers tourism threats to World Heritage Sites, and hears calls for separate criteria for Asian World Heritage designations. And the Galapagos Islands tries to deal with threats from tourism and immigration.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

G4T #18: Space Tourism and the Geography of Brazil

This is a Geography for Travelers Podcast related postThis week's podcast covers Geographic Literacy, The Great Escape/Scavenger Hunt, Space Tourism, and the Geography of Brazil. Quite a mashing of topics! and I am not sure if I pull them all together as well as I had hoped.

My students are studying South America this week, and so my goal was to talk about South America -- in some way. However, in looking through my travel and tourism news sources, I found very little about tourism and travel in South America. For some reason South America does not appear as frequently in the international news travel news as does much of the rest of the world, including Cetral America/Caribbean. While I admit that I have my own personal bias toward events related to Asia, my sources are more general than that. If anyone knows a good sources for travel and tourism news about South America, please let me know.

Getting this week's podcast up was quite a challenge. I have a new condensor microphone. And even know people say it's supposed to be a very good one, I find it tended to pick up the "S" sound very prominently. This is known as "sibilance", and is supposed to be fixed by using a pop filter. Well, I have a pop filter but it does not seem to really help that much. So I went through the entire podcast and I reduced the level of the "S" sound every time it appeared in and annoying manner. This took a couple more hours of postprocessing than I would normally have done. Hopefully I can get this figured out for the next week's podcast.

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Here are links to the items mentioned on today's this week's podcasts:

* Geography skills or the lack there of
http://aplace.blog.com/317340
* AAA travel high school challenge contest offers students more than $100,000 in scholarships and prizes
http://www.medfordnews.com/articles/index.cfm?artOID=319397&cp=10996
* AAA travel challenge
http://www.aaa.com/TravelChallenge
* Great escape 2005
http://www.globalscavengerhunt.com/home.htm
* Great escapes travel humor
http://www.globalscavengerhunt.com/travelyukes.htm
* Space adventures
http://www.spaceadventures.com
* Brazil gears up for commercial spaceport
http://www.travelwirenews.com/cgi-script/csArticles/articles/000029/002906.htm

* Brics: the changing face of global power -- a four-part series by BBC News
- New players challenge world order
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4260368.stm
- Boom times await new powers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4308382.stm
- New muscles in the marketplace
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4330520.stm
- Causes for concern for new hours
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4352696.stm

Here are a few other Space Tourism news items that may be of interest to potential space travelers:

* BBC: The Space Race: Space Tourism (audio)http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1744_spacerace/page4.shtml
* BBC: Space tourist returns to Earth
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4329328.stm
* BBC: Firm offers $100m orbit of moon
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4139188.stm
* Virgin Galactic - space flight reservations website (f0r 2008)
http://www.virgingalactic.com/en/when.asp
* New Voyager News - source for space tourism news
http://www.newvoyagenews.com/news/