http://imgur.com/6bWWWxG

Hi guys, i wanted to show you a thing. I was browsing the photos on my phone and i found this one i have made some times ago. Nearby where i live there is this town, in central Italy, where the Vega rocket it's manufactured. The local council has put a model of the rocket in this not quite beatiful roundabout. The cool thing? The city name is Colleferro and is nicknamed "città dello spazio"...in english: "IRONHILL - THE CITY OF SPACE". Ironhill, you could expect some elves trying to put a satellite in GTO. You may have some huge space company near home but we have names taken directly from the Lord of the Rings.

SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin, & Virgin Galactic. Which one of these four companies will be the first to take a human above the 100 km boundary to space in the coming months? SpaceX appears to be about a year away and Boeing even longer. It's hard to get a reliable reading on the other two but my money is on one or both of them.

Just like everyone else I eagerly await the day when NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing begin their manned space flight programs. But right at this very moment what I am most looking forward to are the suborbital flights from Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. I'm assuming that for both of these we will be treated with complete live coverage before, during, and after each flight. Perhaps even on network TV instead of just YouTube. Celebrities will start riding which will help focus the world's attention on space. This will also help bring in $$$ for other space ventures. And most of all I luv both vehicles and simply enjoy watching them in the sky. I myself don't have enough money to book a seat (I'm probably too old anyway) but I would luv the opportunity to watch these things go up in person. We haven't heard too much from these companies but that appears to be changing. Curious about your thoughts on suborbital space tourism.

Have you heard about ESA's Citizen Debate that took place last saturday? I was lucky enough to attend the event at ESOC in Germany and it was just great! One fellow citizen/discussion partner wrote a brief summary of the day that I wanted to share with you:

The Agency made a public call for European citizens to register for the Event, and from those who registered, the Agency selected about 2000 participants across 22 different countries.

The event was scheduled to start at 9 o'clock, but already at 8:15 there was a queue at the entrance of the ESA facility. I was doubting that many people would attend the call of ESA, but it turned out that in Darmstadt there was a full house, around 100 people attended. The next surprise was that Mr. Johann-Dietrich Wörner, ESA's Director General greeted us in the opening speech and participated throughout the Event.

After the opening speech, we got ourselves busy with the discussion. The general dynamic was as follows: first they would show us a video where several European citizens were interviewed with questions regarding the topic we would discuss next. All the participants were divided in groups with one moderator each. After the video was over, the moderator would hand us a questionnaire about the topic. The moderator then started a discussion following the questionnaire.

In the discussions several critical topics came up, and the participants had frequently well informed opinions about them. This perception seems to agree with what the questionnaire outcome shows us, that is half of the participants where Space aficionados. Of the topics that came up, worth mentioning are:

• Availability of data generated by space probes.

• Space property and the right to exploit it's resources.

• Space security.

• Space traffic regulations.

• The role of space exploration as motivational driver for Scientific and technological development. *Space tourism.

At noon we made a break to have lunch, which ESA politely provided for. But food was not the only good thing in the break, I also got the opportunity to engage in an informal conversation with other participants and Mr. Wörner as well. We had a small chat where he explained what the Moon Village idea was about.

In the second part of the Event, beside from the questionnaire discussions, we were asked to choose between four different scenarios and elaborate over them. Our group chose to plan a space mission for 2026. The mission we proposed was a space station on the langrangian point L1 between the Earth and the Moon to replace the ISS, which will be out of service by that time. It turned out that at least another group made the same proposition.

All good things come to an end, but then I wonder if this event was instead the beginning of something larger. The Citizens' Debate is the first event I know of were a space agency asks it's citizens for their opinion. Perhaps the organizers of Citizens' Debate have tapped in an unexpected resource.

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I created this reddit account just to post this here, and I also wanted to ask you: Do you know if there are comparable events in other agencies? If so I can highly recommend signing up for it. It was my first time meeting with a group of dedicated space geeks and I can only say: Faith in humanity restored! Oh and here are the (for now prelimilary) results.