NASA's Ares I rocket lifts off in this artist's conception. (Credit: NASA)

Speaking at a Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership round table on Saturday, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin expressed concern about the Obama Administration’s decision to review the space agency’s Constellation lunar program:

Griffin said that NASA does not need the type of review that the Obama administration is proposing, but if it is to occur, he hopes that it convinces the administration to support the manned space program.

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SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket takes off on first successful flight.

SpaceX’s launch of Malaysia’s Razaksat remote sensing satellite has been rescheduled for mid-July, a two-month slip from its original April 21 launch date.

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The U.S. Air Force has issued a request for information from aerospace companies on reusable booster system (RBS) that could reduce the cost of getting into orbit and allow for the deployment of military assets.

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DigitalGlobe Shares Advance After $279.3 Million IPO
Bloomberg.com

DigitalGlobe Inc., a provider of satellite photography to Google Inc. and the U.S. government, climbed 13 percent after raising more than planned in an initial public offering.

DigitalGlobe rose $2.50 to $21.50 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Shares of the Longmont, Colorado-based company climbed as high as $25 earlier in the session.

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Russia Today has an interesting update about tourism to the International Space Station:

The agency’s head Anatoly Perminov asked Roman Romanenko to assess the feasibility of permanently keeping three Russian cosmonauts in orbit. “This is very important, because it’s about big money,” ITAR-TASS news agency quotes him as saying. Romanenko will go to the ISS on the next Soyuz spacecraft to be launched from Baikonur cosmodrome.

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NBC News is reporting that former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. will “likely” be named the new head of the space agency next week:

Former astronaut Charles F. Bolden Jr. will meet with President Obama in the Oval Office on Monday morning and likely will be appointed the new NASA administrator, a senior administration official told NBC News on Thursday.

If he is chosen as expected, Bolden, a veteran of four spaceflights with more than 680 hours in Earth orbit, would be the first African-American appointed to NASA’s top post. Bolden retired from the Marine Corps in 2003 as a major general.

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NASA MISSION UPDATE

Mission specialists John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel completed STS-125’s first spacewalk Thursday at 4:12 p.m. EDT.

During the 7-hour, 20-minute excursion, the pair removed the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and replaced it with a new wide-field camera. The new camera will allow the telescope to take large-scale, clear and detailed photos over a wide range of colors.

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Ariane 5

ESA PRESS RELEASE

Two of the most ambitious missions ever attempted to unveil the secrets of the darkest, coldest and oldest parts of the Universe got off to a successful start this afternoon with the dual launch of ESA’s far infrared space telescope Herschel and cosmic background mapper Planck on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana.

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PRESS RELEASE

SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Virgin Galactic’s Will Whitehorn and Orion Propulsion’s Tim Pickens among private sector entrepreneurs on hand to discuss the next frontier of the space industry.

The National Space Society (NSS) announced today that Day One of the 28th annual International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will dedicate itself to an in-depth look into the emerging privately funded sector of the space industry.

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Shyamal Majumdar: Isro’s over the moon
The Daily Standard

The average number of applicants since Isro’s inception has never been even half of the 135,000 received this year. Of these, around 70,000 students qualified for the entrance examination held on April 26; of these, 46,000 actually took the test. This again was a high proportion compared to earlier years when over 70 per cent of the qualifying candidates never even appeared for the test as they either opted for private sector jobs or went abroad where salaries were at least five times more.

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Clark Lindsey over at Hobby Space points to an interesting interview with space lawyer Jim Dunstan. The expert in space policy and law has some choice things to say about current efforts to get astronauts beyond LEO and the role of private industry, author Robert Bauman writes:

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ISRO to launch re-usable rockets within next 10 to 15 years
The Hindu

“ISRO will launch these re-usable rockets within next 10 to 15 years,” [ISRO Chairman G Madhavan] Nair told reporters on the sidelines of AV Rama Rao Technology Award Lecture on Advances in Space Materials on the occasion of National Technology Day celebrations at IICT here on Monday.

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