Banksy Exceeding Expectations, Again

Not surprisingly, Banksy works exceed expectations at London urban art auctions. Two spray paintings by Banksy were sold for an above-estimate 120,000 pounds ($234,000) each in a London sale of urban art recently.

Two pieces of artwork, including the one on the left, had been expected to fetch up to 50,000 pounds and 80,000 pounds each. Both were bought by telephone bidders. The 146-lot sale in an industrial space in Shoreditch, east London, the first of its type ever organized by a regional auction house, totaled 801,204 pounds with fees against an estimate of 672,000 pounds to 977,000 pounds, with 89 percent of the lots sold during the three-hour event, the company said.

Read the full article at Bloomberg

Tourist space travel, not that far away?

Xcor Aerospace announced plans for a two-seater commercial spacecraft called the Lynx on Wednesday. It was also announced that Lynx could probably take its first test flight by 2010. The spacecraft would allow passengers to take a 25-minute spaceflight. “Our company’s goal has always been to build rocket-powered vehicles that can be flown like regular aircraft,” said company president Jeffrey Greason, who claims that the Lynx is relatively environmentally friendly: “They are fully reusable, burn cleanly, and release fewer particulates than solid-fuel or hybrid rocket motors,” he says.