RT: @BonNova regrets to announce that we will not be flying in the competition this year. Thanks to all following BonNova. The team was to have flown at Cantril, California on Monday and Tuesday.
Successful firing of cryogenic engine a challenge for new ISRO chief
Thaindian News
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman-designate K. Radhakrishnan, who takes over Oct 31, has said his first priority would be to see that the indigenously built cryogenic engine is made ready for the GSLV launch by the year-end.
Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo with Burt Rutan and Richard Branson
Virgin’s Scottish space dream
The Times
Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, has held talks with Lord Drayson, the science minister, in the past few weeks about establishing an operation at the Lossiemouth RAF airbase in Scotland.
Richard Garriott
At home with Richard Garriott, the talk is all about space
The Statesman
As for Garriott, his latest dream is to catch a ride in one of those suborbital vehicles — and then step off. “Which means space diving,” he said.
He’s working with a number of groups to develop the technology to do it, and survive. One of the problems with space diving, he said, is that once you hit the atmosphere, you’re traveling at speeds of about Mach 5, which means that the airflow might shred your spacesuit.
XCOR CEO and Augustine Commission member Jeff Greason addressed the panel’s report in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel. He had a few choice things to say about criticism of the commission’s findings and U.S. space policy:
OS: Now, let me put something to you that has been put to me. I don’t necessarily agree with it but it is a sentiment that is out there. By not finding anything useful the U.S. can do in space for NASA’s current human space flight budget of $7 billion or $8 billion a year, the committee failed. What’s your reaction to that sentiment?
JG: It’s not failure to point out truth. The truth is the truth. And it is high time that national space policy was made on the basis of truth and not on the basis of convenience. It is not true to say that we found there is nothing NASA can do within its current budget. There are two options laid out in the report that NASA can do with its current budget. What we did not find was a way for NASA to do significant human exploration beyond low Earth orbit in the near term with this current budget. And I don’t like that answer either but that is not going to change it.
EU Reps Express Support for Big Investment in Exploration
Space News
Representatives from most of the 27 member governments of the European Union (EU) on Oct. 23 expressed support for a major, if still undefined, financial investment in space exploration alongside the European Space Agency (ESA) but conceded it will take a year before they are ready to set firm budget and policy goals.
Artist Impression of Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo/SpaceShipOne over Spaceport America in New Mexico.
NMSA PRESS RELEASE
Officials from the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) announced that they will begin offering paid public hardhat tours of the Spaceport America construction site beginning December 2009.
The Indian government on Saturday appointed a new chairman of ISRO. G. Madhavan Nair, who has served in the role for six years, will be retiring next week:
K. Radhakrishnan, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, was Saturday named the next chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
Armed with a fax copy of his appointment Radhakrishnan, who takes over from G. Madhavan Nair, visited the famed Sree Krishna Temple Guruvayoor here Saturday evening.
Radhakrishnan said he was told of his appointment by phone from New Delhi. He then gave the number of the temple board office here where his appointment copy was faxed.
This is interesting:
ISRO chief G Madhavan Nair, who is to retire by this month-end after an illustrious career at the space agency, bemoans that the country’s higher education system is not up to the mark, churning out graduates only for routine jobs….
Appointed as chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation in 2003, Nair’s tenure saw realisation of 27 space missions, of which 25 were successful, with India’s maiden moon mission Chandrayaan-1 being the pinnacle of glory for the country’s space agency.
Nair got two extensions in 2005 and 2007.
What? Nair’s retiring next week?
Discovery News reports on a NASA scientist who has launched a truth campaign against the fictional “2012” movie that predicts doomsday is only three years away:
“I don’t have anything against the movie. It’s the way it’s been marketed and the way it exploits people’s fears,” NASA scientist David Morrison at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.
The FastForward Study Group, a broadly represented aerospace industry working group focused on the issues of future very high-speed, global point-to-point (PTP) travel for passengers and cargo, today announces the public release of its first white paper entitled “Getting Faster: A case for high-speed global point-to-point flight as a logical transition between suborbital space tourism and low-cost, reusable space access.”
NASA PRESS RELEASE
A NASA App for the iPhone and iPod touch is available free of charge at the App Store from Apple. The NASA application will deliver a wealth of information, videos, images and news updates about NASA missions to people’s fingertips.
“Making NASA more accessible to the public is a high priority for the agency,” said Gale Allen, director of Strategic Integration and Management for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington. “Tools like this allow us to provide users easy access to NASA information and progress at a fast pace.”