BALL CORP PRESS RELEASE
Ball Corporation will record an after-tax gain of approximately $31 million, or approximately 32 cents per diluted share, and realize cash proceeds of approximately $37 million in the company’s second quarter results on the sale of 75 percent of its shares of DigitalGlobe stock.
Lawmakers Concerned about NASA’s Human Spaceflight Future
Space News
During a series of budget hearings last week, lawmakers pressed acting NASA Administrator Chris Scolese to concede that U.S. President Barack Obama’s five-year budget plan does not support a robust human spaceflight program capable of delivering astronauts to the Moon by 2020.
A Russian Soyuz spacecraft in orbit
Australia’s Sunday Herald takes a look at how Russia is trying to restore its space program to Soviet-era primacy:
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called the programme sacrosanct, personally pledging to maintain federal funding to Russia’s cash-starved space agency Roskosmos.
Space shuttle Atlantis lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, completing the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas
NASA MISSION UPDATE
Space shuttle Atlantis landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California at 11:39 a.m. EDT, completing a 13-day journey of approximately 5.3 million miles in space.
A taikonaut emerges from China's Shenzhou 7 spacecraft after a successful orbital flight
A couple of interesting stories about developments in the Chinese and Indian space programs. Domain-b examines whether a space race is developing between the two emerging nations:
Both countries have a firm eye on the moon’s resources. While India has hinted at its eventual aim of mining for lunar resources, China is thinking of setting up a base on the moon. Interestingly, both India and China have announced plans to send a landing mission to the moon in the first half of the next decade. But while China is edging close to firming up its plan for a manned landing mission, the Indian Space Research Organisation has made it clear that a manned moon landing project would be taken up only if it is ”totally justified”.
Charles Bolden has picked up the support of the Space Foundation, the Coalition for Space Exploration, and a key Republican senator.
Russian rockets readied for South America launch
AFP
The maker of Russia’s Soyuz rockets said on Thursday it had finished building the first rockets due to be launched from South America pad in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
“The first two rockets are ready. They have got through all the tests and have been placed in the containers in which they will be delivered,” said the deputy head of TsSKB-Progress, Sergei Tyulevin, quoted by ITAR-TASS….
President Barack Obama today nominated four-time space shuttle veteran Charles Bolden to become the next NASA administrator, a slot that has been vacant since Jan. 20.
The President also nominated Lori Garver as deputy administrator. Garver is a former NASA associate administrator who headed up Obama’s NASA transition team.
Flights of fancy at 8600km/h
Adelaide Now
Until this week, such “blink-of-an-eye” travel times were the realm of science-fiction writers but – thanks to Australian and American defence scientists – “hypersonic” travel for the masses has taken a big step forward.
At the remote Woomera Test Range in the South Australian desert this month, a metre-long hypersonic air vehicle was successfully test-flown at more than seven times the speed of sound.
UFC PRESS RELEASE
Senior hospitality, tourism and entertainment leaders will join space industry executives at a unique conference next week to talk about how their businesses can collaborate.
The Space Investment Summit 6 will be held Wednesday, May 27, at the Omni Orlando Resort in ChampionsGate. The summit is organized in part by the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management.
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XCOR's Lynx suborbital vehicle
Who can make the greenest rocket?
Mother Nature Network
“The motivation wasn’t necessarily that we wanted to join Greenpeace,†says Xcor spokesman Doug Graham. His company sought to build a fuel-efficient vehicle that would keep costs down. Xcor also needed a nontoxic fuel that would be easy to handle. So it built a small, two-seated vehicle powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen, which burns cleanly at about 6,000°F and emits no smoke or particulate matter.
