SpaceX's Falcon 9 on the pad at Cape Canaveral. (Credit: Chris Thompson/SpaceX)

NASA MISSION UPDATE

The first SpaceX Falcon 9 demonstration launch for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program is targeted for liftoff on Tuesday, Dec. 7. Liftoff will occur from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch window extends from 9:03 a.m. to 12:22 p.m. EST. If necessary, launch opportunities also are available on Dec. 8 and Dec. 9 with the same window.

PRELAUNCH NEWS CONFERENCE

The prelaunch news conference for the COTS 1 Falcon 9 launch is planned for L-1, currently Monday, Dec. 6 at 1:30 p.m., at the press site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA Television will provide live coverage, and the briefing will be streamed at

https://www.nasa.gov/ntv.

(more…)

Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kodratiev practices karate. (Credit: Roscosmos)

ROSCOSMOS PRESS RELEASE

Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kodratiev, who is scheduled for the space mission to the International Space Station on Dec. 15, will maintain his physical state by karate exercises in 0-gravity.

(more…)

Elon Musk's wife, Talulah Riley, on the set of ''St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold'' in August 2009. (Source=https://www.flickr.co)

Talulah Riley: how to marry a billionaire
London Evening Standard

Talulah Riley has made her new husband a promise. ‘I’ve told him I’ll retire with him to Mars,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘If he has colonised it by then.’ She smiles, but she is coolly earnest. She was once a starlet from Hertfordshire, but she now moves in interplanetary circles. Her husband is the internet billionaire turned space entrepreneur Elon Musk, and her future home is an environmentally controlled pod on Mars. Elon will zoom around outside on rockets, while she makes their biosphere cosy. ‘I’d love to get involved with designing habitat systems on Mars – like housekeeping on a grand scale,’ she says dreamily.

(more…)

Famed biologist Craig Venter spoke to a joint session of the SSI Space Manufacturing 14 Conference and NASA’s Synthetic Biology Workshop last month at the NASA Ames Conference Center. The full video archives for the Space Manufacturing Conference are here. You can view PowerPoint presentations here.

This Week in The Space Review… Black Apollo As part of preparations for the Apollo landings, NASA needed to get detailed imagery of potential landing sites. Dwayne Day reveals a partnership between NASA and NRO that proposed using Apollo spacecraft equipped with reconnaissance satellite cameras to provide those images. Year of the solar system While most of the recent attention NASA has received has been on its human spaceflight programs, […]

NASA ANNOUNCEMENT

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website at https://www.nasa.gov.

(more…)

Gear down. (Photo: Mark Greenberg)

Mojave Air and Space Port General Manager Stuart O. Witt is the general manger of the Mojave Air and Space Port is co-author of a nice op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle about NASA’s new direction:

The Obama administration, Congress, NASA and the private sector are finally voyaging toward a market-based space industry. Admittedly, the new policy’s vision is not bold enough nor its exploration schedule aggressive enough, but it does – as the Great One advised – “skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been.”

It dismantles a cost-plus quagmire that has left Americans traveling in space far less often, far less safely, at far greater expense and, most ironically, not so very far at all. Much must be done to maintain U.S. space leadership, but privatization is absolutely required.

(more…)

This week on The Space Show with Dr. David Livingston…. Monday, November 29 , 2010, 2-3:30 PM PST. We welcome Reverend James Heiser to discuss his new book, “Civilization and the New Frontier: Reflections on Virtue and the Settlement of The New World.” He is also a member of the Board of Directors and Steering Committee of The Mars Society. Tuesday, November 30, 2010, 7-8:30 PM PST. We welcome Dr. […]

The late Rocketplane which was to have flown from Oklahoma.

Oklahoma State Rep. David Dank wants to shut down the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority as part of a broader consolidation of government, according to News on 6:

The agency is getting $424,289 from the state this year. Executive Director Bill Khourie’s salary is $86,005. Dank believes the agency should shut down.

(more…)

Prof. John Lewis gave a dinner talk about Asia’s road to the moon during the Space Studies Institute’s Space Manufacturing Conference last month. A full archive of videos is located here. View the archive of PowerPoint presentations given during the conference here.

Robin Snelson has put video and PowerPoint archives online from the Space Studies Institute’s Space Manufacturing 14 Conference, which was held in Silicon Valley at the end of October. The video archive is here. You can view PowerPoint presentations here.

Brahmand.com takes a look at India’s step-by-step approach to developing reusable hypersonic launch vehicles:

The RLV will loft a satellite into orbit and immediately re-enter the atmosphere and glide back for a conventional landing. The RLV and the rocket booster will be recovered separately, with the former making a conventional landing on a runway and booster making a parachute landing.

(more…)