The Space Review explores the problems faced by Charles Bolden, NASA, the auto industry, and GPS. Also, a couple of pieces about the Apollo program.
Paul Breed and his Unreasonable Rocket team have conducted new tests on their engine.
International Space Station
Space station crew to increase
Florida Today
The crew of the International Space Station will double in size this week, a long-awaited milestone that will triple the amount of scientific research that can be done on the $100 billion orbiting outpost.
NewScientist reports that previous martian landers could have destroyed the very life that they were seeking to find: (more…)
Exclusive interview with Griffin on US space funding
WAFF 48
“We should be mad as hell and not going to take it any more,” said Griffin on the gap left between the shuttle retirement and Constellation project. “I am tempted to use the word disgusting, but at the very least, it is unseemly.”
FAA COMSTAC presentations are online for its May meeting. Topics include launch demand, operationally responsive space, export reform, reusable launch vehicles, and risk management.
The Mars500 crew helps ESA-selected crewmember Oliver Knickel celebrate his 29th birthday inside the isolation facility in Moscow, Russia. Credits: ESA
As the crew complete their seventh week inside the special isolation facility at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, Russia, ESA-selected Mars500 crewmember Oliver Knickel looks back on a week that included a celebration of his 29th birthday.
Over at Spaceflightnow.com, Craig Covault reports that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will have enough resolution to allow scientists to find previous exploration efforts on the surface:
NASA MISSION UPDATE
NASA’s return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth’s nearest neighbor. On Thursday, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. The spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
NASA Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take the images combined into this full-circle view of the rover's surroundings on the 1,506th through 1,510th Martian days, or sols, of Opportunity's mission on Mars (April 19-23, 2008). South is at the center; north is at both ends.
NASA MISSION UPDATE
One of NASA’s two Mars rovers has recorded a compelling saga of environmental changes that occurred over billions of years at a Martian crater.
The Mars rover, Opportunity, surveyed the rim and interior of Victoria Crater on the Red Planet from September 2006 through August 2008. Key findings from that work, reported in the May 22 edition of the journal Science, reinforce and expand what researchers learned from Opportunity’s exploration of two smaller craters after landing on Mars in 2004.
The National Research Council has released a report calling for the strictest of quarantine procedures relating to any soil and rock samples returned from Mars.
The Assessment of Planetary Protection Requirements for Mars Sample Return Missions report recommends that “samples returned from Mars by spacecraft should be contained and treated as though potentially hazardous until proven otherwise.”
This week’s guests on the Space Show are Michael Potter, Phil Harris, and Ayodele Adekunle Faiytole.