NASA Orion

Writing in The Huffington Post, Buzz Aldrin said NASA is making a mistake by replacing the winged shuttle with smaller ocean-landing Orion capsule:

Two Shuttle accidents — each caused by NASA hubris — combined with a tight budget have caused NASA to retire the fleet. Understandable, I think. But in a move that truly makes no sense, they will be replaced by…the space capsules we long ago outgrew. And to save even more money, these cannon-ball-like capsules would land once again in the ocean, not on dry land. To recover Orion will require deployment of ships in several landing zones. How much will that cost? Much of the Orion will be expendable, such as the heat shield. It seems we have decided to throw away our Shuttle experience and go “back to the future”.

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Canada’s space program hampered by U.S. laws
The Kingston Whig Standard

Canada’s space program has lots of ideas and commercial potential, but one of the big things holding it back is the lack of a Canadian launch program, the Canadian Space Summit was told over the weekend.

Also, both the military and civilian space research programs in Canada are hobbled by the fact that the country needs to rely on rockets launched by India, China or Russia, over which the U. S. holds wide-ranging veto powers.

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India is looking to put more domestically produced instruments on its Chandrayaan-II moon mission. The country’s first lunar spacecraft contained 11 instruments, six of which were supplied by foreign organizations.

Mylswamy Annadurai, Project Director of Chandrayan Mission II, ISRO, on Monday said that there would be more indigenous components in country’s second moon mission….

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Something I didn’t see last week when looking at Blue Origin’s plans to begin flying experiments, although it is on the website:

Blue Origin expects the first opportunities for experiments requiring an accompanying researcher astronaut to be available in 2012. Flight opportunities in 2011 may be available for autonomous or remotely-controlled experiments on an uncrewed flight test.

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Artists conception of WhiteKnightTwo and the SpaceShipTwo space tourism vehicle. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic’s Space-Grazing Aircraft Is Ready for Liftoff
Wired

After all of the prize money and media coverage, routine space tourism — this grand flight of human fancy — seems about to happen. SpaceShipTwo will be carried aloft by a mother ship, WhiteKnightTwo, which has been flying for nearly a year. The first SS2 is under construction and slated to begin flight tests in early 2010. Virgin has already sold $60 million in tickets to its first 300 passengers. And a taxpayer-funded spaceport is under construction near Las Cruces, New Mexico.

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Filmmaking, Sumo and Space Tourism Take Flight at IDFA
indieWIRE

Swiss director Christian Frei also had huge bureaucratic hurdles to deal with for his look at the rising number of space tourists who pay millions for the chance to reach orbit via the Russian space agency. Frei takes his camera to remote Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union built its “Star City,” a secretive but once proud town that was the center of the USSR’s thriving space program where the first satellite, Sputnik, launched the space race back in the ‘50s.

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A video Thanksgiving greeting from astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

PRESS RELEASE

Today, Congresswoman Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL-24) and Congressman Ken Calvert (R-CA-44) sent a bipartisan letter to President Obama signed by 81 members of the U.S. House of Representatives from across the country calling for additional funding for NASA’s human spaceflight program. The large number of cosigners is an indication of the strong national support for human spaceflight and its many benefits.

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NASA PRESS RELEASE

NASA has selected for development 368 small business innovation projects that include research to minimize aging of aircraft, new techniques for suppressing fires on spacecraft and advanced transmitters for deep space communications.

Chosen from more than 1,600 proposals, the competitively selected awards will address agency research and technology needs. The awards are part of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, and Small Business Technology Transfer, or STTR, programs.

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ASTROBOTIC PRESS RELEASE

NASA today selected Astrobotic Technology and Carnegie Mellon University for two contracts to study Moon excavation robots and methods to simulate the one-sixth lunar gravity on Earth.

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International Space Station

UPDATES: The three ISU alumni left the show within weeks after this blog post was published. They will not comment publicly on why. A representative for Stephen Hawking has denied the physicist has any involvement in the program. The show has continued under Executive Producer Jonathan Nolan, a former attorney who was disbarred in Australia for embezzlement from a trust fund he controlled.

A trio of ISU Summer Session 2009 students have gone public with a plan for a reality show that will choose two averagenauts for the trip of a lifetime – into orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle.

Contestants can register for the Starwalker competition beginning on Dec. 12. Filming is set to begin next May with flights set for 2011 and 2012.

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Asteroid Ida

Plan for Human Mission to Asteroid Gains Speed
Space News

Call it Operation: Plymouth Rock. A plan to send a crew of astronauts to an asteroid is gaining momentum, both within NASA and industry circles.

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