XCOR's Lynx suborbital vehicle
XTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES PRESS RELEASE
February 19, 2011
One of the nation’s leading experts in space flight safety and risk assessment, Dr. Feng Hsu recently agreed to support suborbital space flight by helping guide the International affairs of Xtraordinary Adventures, a Florida space travel agency representing XCOR’s Lynx spaceplane.
Diego Urbina and Alexandr Smoleevskiy on one-hour 12-minute Marswalk on Monday, 14 February 2011 at the simulated martian terrain of the Mars500 experiment facility in Moscow. Credits: ESA / IPMB
Mars 500 Diary: Unpacking the Lander and preparing for a hike on Mars
by Romain Charles
9 February 2011
In the latest diary Romain writes about opening the hatches to the cargo-filled Lander, emptying it and preparing for the big event: ‘landing’ on Mars and going out for a walk!
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If the past week has taught us anything, it’s that NASA needs some new enemies. Consider the following:
Something tells me if we had enemies on Mars, we would have been there a million yesterdays ago.
Florida SPACErePORT says that SpaceX has a new vice president of communications: Robert Block, the current space editor at the Orlando Sentinel. He will be working out of Cape Canaveral starting on March 1.
Jack Kennedy tells me that a measure to earmark funding for the Virginiia Commercial Space Flight Authority has passed the House of Delegates by a vote of 89-8 after being approved unanimously by the Senate. The measure now heads to Gov. Robert McDonnell for his signature. The bill earmarks any state income tax generated by human space flight or human space flight training to be directed to the space authority. […]
The Canadian Space Agency’s latest annual report, The State of the Canadian Space Sector 2009, shows that the nation’s space revenues exceeded $3 billion in that year. In the report, CSA President Steve MacLean wrote:
The talented men and women who make up the Canadian space workforce are the backbone of the space sector. In 2009, workforce numbers experienced the second fastest growth rate (after 2004) since we started publishing this survey thirteen years ago. The Canadian Space Sector now employs 7,564 people of which 3,770 are highly qualified professionals.
The latest update from Space Access Society Founder Henry Vanderbilt in which he discusses NASA’s budget status, prospects for the future, and what the NewSpace community should do about it.
Space Access Update #121 Â 2/16/11
Copyright 2011 by Space Access Society
Will Pomerantz is moving up the alphabet. After nearly six years running prize competitions at the X Prize Foundation, Will has accepted a new job as Vice President for Special Projects at Virgin Galactic. This week also marks the end of a journey and the start of another for me personally. This piece of news I share with considerable sadness, but also a great deal of excitement: after almost six […]
JAXA PRESS RELEASE
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) would like to announce that Astronaut Koichi Wakata has been selected as a crewmember for the 38th/39th Expedition Mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
Wakata’s leadership has been highly appraised and recognized domestically and internationally, thus he will exercise his capability as the first Japanese commander for the 39th ISS Expedition Mission.
This pair of images shows the before-and-after comparison of the part of comet Tempel 1 that was hit by the impactor from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Maryland/Cornell
NASA’s Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.
The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet’s atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006.
SpaceX and other commercial launch providers will have more competition for lofting some of NASA’s science missions — courtesy of America’s nuclear arsenal.
NASA has agreed to consider using more ICBM-derived Minotaur IV boosters to launch medium-size missions after an investigation by the agency’s Inspector General found that the move could save a significant amount of money and hedge against delays in the availability of commercial alternatives.
In a report released today, the IG’s Office said NASA has been resisting the move because it could interfere with the development of other commercial alternatives. However, agency officials said they would include Minotaur IV for medium-size science missions after they were given a draft copy of the report. Minotaur IV was already in the mix for launching small payloads.
