Lift-Off! SpaceX Dragon Heads to Space Station
Posts tagged "NASA"
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Interactive Timeline of SpaceX's Successes, Failures and Future →
SpaceX‘s upcoming launch of the Dragon spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station is finally happening. Probably.
Originally, SpaceX thought this flight could take place in 2010, but that was later changed to the summer of 2011 and then the fall and winter. This year alone the launch date slipped from Feb. 7 to April 30, and then May 7. Such delays are inevitable in the complicated business of space.
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Ex-Flight Director Urges NASA to Kill Next Rocket System →
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is a bit of a mixed bag. Promising a return to Saturn V-type strength, the rocket is a congressional camel reflecting the self interested agendas of the congressmen responsible for its funding.
Former flight director Chris Kraft is adding his to the growing number of dissenting voices decrying SLS as deeply flawed. It’s destroying jobs and killing NASA, he says, and there are cheaper ways to undertake missions to the moon and asteroids.
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SpaceX Has Lofty Goal: Help Save Humanity from Extinction →
SpaceX plans to launch a historic demonstration mission to the International Space Station next week, but the company’s ambitions extend far beyond low-Earth orbit.
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Inside Sustainability Base: NASA's Space Station On Earth →
The new Silicon Valley installation is designed to test the terrestrial applications for the space agency’s technologies and create the most efficient building imaginable
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Cryobots Could Drill Into Icy Moons With Remote Fiber-Optic Laser Power →
Future extraterrestrial rovers may be powered remotely by high-energy laser beams shot through miles of thin fiber-optic cables. This new technology could allow robotic probes to penetrate thick layers of ice to explore Antarctic lakes or the subterranean oceans on icy moons like Europa or Enceladus, and even power a new kind of rocket into space.
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Does Life Imitate Avatar? James Cameron Launching New Space Mining Venture →
*** Media Alert *** Media Alert *** Media Alert ***
Space Exploration Company to Expand Earth’s Resource Base
WHAT: Join visionary Peter H. Diamandis, M.D.; leading commercial space entrepreneur Eric Anderson; former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki; and planetary scientist & veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones, Ph.D. on Tuesday, April 24 at 10:30 a.m. PDT in Seattle, or via webcast, as they unveil a new space venture with a mission to help ensure humanity’s prosperity.
Supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google’s Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr., the company will overlay two critical sectors — space exploration and natural resources — to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP.
This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources.’
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NASA Wants YOU to Design its 2018 Mars Mission →
When President Obama announced NASA’s budget for FY 2013, Mars was hit hard.
Exploration of the Red Planet lost 21 percent of its 2012 funding, dropping from $1,510 million to $1,192 million. But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a fantastic launch opportunity in 2018.
Under its new diminished Mars program, the mission will certainly be different from the planned ExoMars mission. How different? Well, have your say. NASA is taking suggestions from the Everyman about what its 2018 mission should look like.
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NASA to fly atomic clock to improve space navigation →
When people think of space technologies, many think of high-tech solar panels, complex and powerful propulsion systems or sophisticated, electronic guidance systems. Another critical piece of spaceflight technology, however, is an ultra stable, highly accurate device for timing — essential to NASA’s success on deep-space exploration missions.
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Curiosity Rover Gets Practice Time Before Mars Landing →
We’ve still got a little over a hundred days before Mars Science Laboratory tries not to smash itself into a million bits while landing on Mars, but the rover’s stunt double (and its human slaves) are hard at work practicing their moves in preparation for August 6th, when Curiosity will make its thrilling touchdown at Gale Crater.
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NASA views our perpetual ocean →
The swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents were captured in this scientific visualization created by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
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NASA's 1966 plan for a mission to Mars →
What is more surprising is that, as early as 1965, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) turned its attention to the scientific tasks astronaut-scientists might perform on Mars. In that year, as part of an ongoing series of Mars mission studies that began in 1962 with the EMPIRE manned Mars/Venus flyby/orbiter study, the Huntsville, Alabama-based NASA center contracted with Avco/RAD to study manned Mars surface operations. This truly was far-sighted thinking; when MSFC paired with Avco/RAD, NASA, with President John F. Kennedy’s end-of-decade deadline for a manned moon landing fast approaching, had barely begun to pay serious attention to the scientific tasks that Apollo astronauts would perform on the moon.
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Getting to the moon on drops of fuel →
Imagine reaching the Moon using just a fraction of a liter of fuel. With their ionic motor, MicroThrust, EPFL scientists and their European partners are making this a reality and ushering in a new era of low-cost space exploration. The complete thruster weighs just a few hundred grams and is specifically designed to propel small (1-100 kg) satellites, which it enables to change orbit around Earth and even voyage to more distant destinations — functions typically possible only for large, expensive spacecraft. The just-released prototype is to be employed on CleanSpace One, a satellite under development at EPFL that is designed to clean up space debris, and on OLFAR, a swarm of Dutch nanosatellites that will record ultra-low radio-frequency signals on the far side of the Moon.
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SpaceX announces a date for first private space dock with space station →
SpaceX’s Company President Gwynne Shotwell used the Satellite 2012 Conference to announce that it has a thin launch window on April 30 that would get it to a scheduled May 3 berthing slot at the International Space Station. The mission, known as COTS 2/3, carries a political payload far larger than the food and clean underwear inside the spacecraft.
For Congress and the Administration, the launch might help make the case that the company’s Dragon spacecraft is a viable option for ferrying astronauts to the Station some day. Moreover, it might prove that the six-year-old COTS program, which allows NASA to partner with corporations to gain access to low Earth orbit, can actually transition to a backbone for manned and unmanned spaceflight
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The sky just swelled to contain over 560 million objects from the new WISE mission catalog →
Our view of the Universe just grew quite a bit more detailed as NASA JPL released the compendium of results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer orbital telescope. WISE was launched into a 525 km orbit on December 14, 2009 and gathered data until the WISE team ran out of funding on February 17, 2011.
With hardware over 1,000 times more sensitive than prior infrared space surveys, WISE surveyed 99 percent of the sky at 4 different wavelengths. Over 15 terabytes of data and 2.7 million images revealed 560 million stars, galaxies, comets, asteroids, and various other objects too cool or red-shifted to show up in anything but the infrared. Astronomers saw Y-dwarfs for the first time, which are white dwarf stars that have become nearly invisible as they cooled. The first Earth trojan asteroid also revealed itself to WISE—it scouts Earth’s orbit 60 degrees ahead of us around the Sun.
