The Russians are in discussion with Americans on a joint venture to revive the NK-33 engine, which was developed for the Soviet manned lunar program.
Masten Space Systems conducted flights 13-16 of its XA-0.1B-750 VTVL rocket vehicle in a single day.
Will Whitehorn says the economy isn’t affecting the sale of Virgin Galactic space tourism tickets.
Orphans of Apollo’s Michael Potter is the guest on the latest edition of Spacevidcast.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin aboard a Space Adventures microgravity flight.
Vacation In Space? It’s Possible … For The Rich
NPR
“It’s really been a lack of competition,” says Eric Anderson, who heads a company called Space Adventures.
He adds that during the space race with the Soviet Union, the technology involved in spaceflight was practically a state secret.
Landing spot ‘centre for Moon tourism’
SBS
“Take only pictures, leave only footprints” is the message to visitors at many beauty spots. One place you won’t see it, though, will be at the first extraterrestrial national park, perhaps set up to preserve the spot on the moon where Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their giant leap for mankind.
Astronomy gastronomy
The Guardian
I went to the Science Museum, which sells ‘Ready To Eat Space Food (TM)’, and bought the full freeze-dried gamut: strawberries, ‘Neapolitan ice cream’ and an ‘ice cream sandwich’. The strawberries were rather delicious – sourly, vividly red, with a curious evanescent texture. They plumped themselves in saliva the instant they touched my tongue, swelling, then immediately dissolving. The ice creams were winningly inedible: bricks of luridly saccharine compacted dust. I put them out in the garden, and they quickly turned soggy from the moisture in the air. Even the birds wouldn’t touch them.
Space: Is the final frontier all it used to be?
The Associated Press
“At the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken, and unrestraint is triumphant.” So said Frederick Jackson Turner, the 19th-century historian whose ideas showed Americans how important their frontier experience was to them.
“I wanted to be a spaceman — that’s what I wanted to be. But now that I am a spaceman, nobody cares about me.” So sang Harry Nilsson, the musician who in 1972 channeled the changing feelings about space exploration in this country.
John Gedmark
Commercial Spaceflight Federation
Armadillo Aerospace conducted two groundbreaking atmospheric test flights this weekend with their “Mod†vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing rocket, a vehicle familiar to anyone who has followed NASA’s Lunar Lander Challenge competitions.
UT Medical Branch at Galveston Press Release
When the Apollo 11 crew got back from the moon, 40 years ago this week, they showed no ill effects from seven days spent in weightlessness. But as American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts began conducting longer-duration space flights, scientists noticed a disturbing trend: the longer humans stay in zero gravity, the more muscle they lose. Space travelers exposed to weightlessness for a year or more — such as those on a mission to Mars, for example — could wind up crippled on their return to Earth, unable to walk or even sit up.
Bill Whitaker: NASA doesn’t have monopoly on ingenuity, spunk in 21st century space race
Waco Tribune
Some insist NASA should be concentrating on the conquest of space and new rocket technologies, leaving the nuts and bolts of building more conventional rockets for NASA to spunky outfits such as SpaceX.
The debate has created rifts. U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican conservative who has made a career of attacking government-run programs, ironically is all for those in his home state, including the beleaguered Constellation program.
Altair
“Orphans of Apollo” Director Michael Potter goes tete-a-tete with Bill Nye the Science Guy on the pages of The Los Angeles Times today.
The topic: whether we should return to the moon.