Fortune has an interesting profile of Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, who has persisted, and seen his company grow, through the ups and downs of the dot-com economy. Presently he's worth around $8 billion, which isn't too bad. In addition to recounting his rise to prominence, the piece also details his plans to transform Amazon into the Web's biggest retailer of digital media. Hence Amazon's e-book reader, the Kindle, and the company's push into the MP3 space, where it's trying to unseat Apple as emperor. Apparently this is a pretty heated competition: According to the Fortune piece, he refuses to use the word "Apple."

Don’t count the Rocket Racing League out just yet. After a lengthy delay and intimations of its demise, the league has finally announced exhibition flights. Pending FAA approval, a ten-minute flight will take place the first weekend of August at this summer’s EAA Airventure festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Granger Whitelaw made the announcement this morning at a press conference in New York, admitting that the news was coming some fifteen months later than he had hoped. “I will take full responsibility” for the delay, he said.

Today in Los Angeles, a private space company unveiled the latest entrant in the race to send paying passengers into suborbital space.

The Lynx, in development by XCOR Aerospace, is envisioned as a two-seat vehicle that will allow a paying passenger to ride up front with the pilot to experience weightlessness and see the Earth from space.

For someone who follows far-out entrepreneurial space ventures for a living, it’s good to soak up some skepticism once in a while. And a heavy dose of skepticism about private-industry space tourism is just what I what I got this morning at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston, during a symposium titled “50 Years of the Space Age: Looking Back, Looking Forward.” Looking forward, this group of experts—including Kathy Sullivan of the Battelle Center for Math and Space Policy, Roald Sagdeev of the University of Maryland-College Park, and Alvin Aldrin, son of Buzz Aldrin—sees hard times ahead for space tourism entrepreneurs.

Poison spinach! User-generated content! Space tourism! Global warming!

On the Las Vegas Strip, home of the biggest and most extravagant hotels in the world, shell-shocked tourists file past one stunningly ostentatious display after another. In the desert city, water says wealth like nothing else, and there’s a lake of it in front of the Bellagio, with fountains blasting 240 feet in the air in time to Broadway show tunes. Just up the street, the Mirage demonstrates that it has money to burn with a fiery volcano erupting from the top of a 119,000-gallon waterfall.