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Space Travel
Water found on the moon – what will it mean for the future?
By Jude Garvey
22:18 September 24, 2009 PDT
Newspapers and websites around the world are buzzing with the news that water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) molecules have been found in the polar regions of the moon. NASA announced yesterday that instruments aboard three separate spacecraft revealed that water molecules were present, although in relatively small amounts. It was also discovered that hydroxyl also existed in the lunar soil. Although the amount of water found is small, it is exciting in terms of potential for the possibilities of establishing a lunar base and even for creating spacecraft fuel. Read More
New ion engine could reach Mars in 39 days
18:41 July 28, 2009 PDT
Last week, as the world celebrated the first lunar landing, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins both called for NASA to make Mars its next goal. But the chemical propulsion system that took them to the moon would take six months, at least, to get a man to Mars and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. However, a new ion plasma rocket being developed by another former astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, could potentially reach Mars in just 39 days using a fraction of the fuel. Read More
That 'small step for man' still very visible on the moon
07:28 July 20, 2009 PDT
Exactly forty years ago today, with fuel running short and alarms buzzing, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set their lunar module Eagle down on the face of the moon, and mankind took its very first step on another celestial body. Last week, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. Even after all these years, there’s something truly heroic about seeing those lunar module descent stages sitting silently on the surface, testament to man’s imagination and determination. Read More
Virgin Galactic and the start of the Commercial Space Race
By Loz Blain
04:41 July 6, 2009 PDT
Space - it's the final frontier of human exploration, a mysterious eternity of distance, all around us and yet so tantalizingly out of reach. In its dark recesses hide the secrets of extraterrestrial life, planets yet to be explored, and it's reasonable to assume, some sort of future home for the human race once we're finished stuffing this planet up. Although mankind has been fascinated with space since we first saw the twinkling of night-time stars, it's only in the last half century that we have developed spaceships that allow us to take both ourselves and our equipment and technology outside the Earth's atmosphere. While the exhilaration of early space exploration seems to have faded in the public imagination over the past three decades, the scene is now set for a whole new space race. Loz Blain looks at where the 21st Century space Odyssey will take us and how we'll get there. Listen to the Podcast or Read More
Spaceport America breaks ground, flights departing soon
21:30 June 25, 2009 PDT
Virgin Galactic may be spending over USD$300 million on a commercial space vehicle, but only now has it actually got a place to land. Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, broke ground in New Mexico on June 19th. The 110,000 square foot facility, designed by Foster and Partners, will cost around $200m and is expected to host the first commercial space flight by 2011. Read More
Space sail to take out the trash
By Darren Quick
12:47 April 26, 2009 PDT
We’ve recently examined the danger posed to future space missions by the ever increasing collection of space junk orbiting the Earth. Now a plan by a pair of space engineers to use a sail to take out the trash – or rather, bring it back to Earth – may help to stop future space missions adding to the problem of space junk. Read More
Toilet training the space community
By Darren Quick
16:27 February 15, 2009 PST
When we are born, we soil ourselves and other people clean it up for us. As we mature, we take responsibility for our own excrement. Strangely, as a society, we're not at all good at toilet training ourselves regarding the excrement produced by industry, transport or agriculture. Human beings capacity to eschew short term gain when faced with long term harm is notoriously woeful so it’s not surprising we've done exactly the same thing in space, leaving so much debris that it's now dangerous to be in the orbital band around earth due to the likelihood of being hit by junk traveling at 18,000 mph. The latest evidence: last week saw the first ever accidental collision between two intact spacecraft, a deactivated Russian satellite and an Iridium 33 satellite, which left a fresh cloud of debris 497 miles above the Earth. Read More
WhiteKnightTwo completes historic maiden flight
17:37 December 22, 2008 PST
WhiteKnightTwo (WK2), the carrier aircraft that will become the launch platform for Virgin Galactic's sub-orbital spaceline has taken to the skies over California in its maiden test flight. Powered by four Pratt and Whitney PW308A turbofan engines, the mammoth, 140-foot wingspan carbon composite aircraft launched from the Mojave Air and Space Port on Sunday morning and completed an hour long test flight without a hitch. Read More
Teddy Bears in space
By Kyle Sherer
03:05 December 8, 2008 PST
For half a century, the friendliest face of space travel was Laika the space-dog, launched into Earth orbit aboard Sputnik II. Now Britain has challenged Laika’s supremacy by launching two teddy bears into the stratosphere. The toys, named MAT and KMS, wore space suits designed by children at the Parkside and Coleridge community colleges. Read More
Remote observatory aims to solve Earth's magnetic mystery
By Kyle Sherer
14:58 December 1, 2008 PST
Until November, Tristan da Cunha was home only to 271 people, a small flightless bird, and a piece of land named Inaccessible Island. Now the world's most remote inhabited archipelago is host to a Danish Observatory designed to help improve our understanding the Earth’s weakening magnetic field and the way this affects satellites. Read More
SpaceX planning DragonLab craft
By Kyle Sherer
14:37 November 5, 2008 PST
SpaceX, the company behind the Falcon series of launch vehicles and the Dragon space capsule, is developing a new free-flying, reusable, commercial craft. To be known as DragonLab, it will transport pressurized and unpressurized payloads to and from space, and will launch aboard a Falcon 9 vehicle. Read More
NASA testing next-gen lunar rover in Arizona
By Kyle Sherer
17:06 October 27, 2008 PDT
NASA’s 12-wheeled Small Pressurized Rover raced (by lunar rover standards) across the moon-like Arizona outback at 6mph this week as part of the 11th annual Desert Research and Technology Studies (RATS). While the buggies on the Apollo missions only provided a 6 mile range, the presence of two or more SPRs on a lunar landing will provide a range of over 150 miles. Read More
India launches first lunar mission
By Kyle Sherer
18:32 October 26, 2008 PDT
The Indian Space Research Organisation has successfully launched Chandrayaan-1, the country’s first scientific mission to the moon. The two-year, USD$80 million mission will see the PSLV-C11 rocket enter lunar orbit in roughly two weeks, before descending to a final 100 km-high circular orbit. The Moon Impact Probe will land on the lunar surface, while the orbiter will continue gathering data with 11 scientific instruments. Read More
Mining the moon: the Scarab lunar prospecting robot
02:16 October 16, 2008 PDT
Plans are afoot to have humans back on the moon by 2020, but if we want to make it more than just a brief visit and truly begin to colonize the solar system, the challenge will be to find ways to extract and exploit local resources that can help sustain a lunar outpost. That's where the Scarab comes in. The four-wheel, 880-pound lunar prospecting robot designed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, and soon to be field tested by NASA on the slopes of a dormant volcano in Hawaii, is equipped to drill and collect three-foot samples of soil and rock while operating in one of the harshest environments imaginable - the moon's southern pole. The rover will act as a terrestrial testbed for the development of technologies that it's hoped can be used to find hydrogen, oxygen and possibly even water, that could be mined from beneath the moon's surface. Read More
SpaceX successfully launches Falcon 1 into orbit
By Kyle Sherer
19:48 September 30, 2008 PDT
With the Space Shuttle scheduled to retire in 2010, alternative transport vessels will need to be developed to keep the International Space Station manned, and to keep options open for possible manned lunar missions. After three failed attempts, the SpaceX Falcon 1 has successfully achieved Earth orbit – the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to do so. Read More
Stephen Hawking to send DNA into space
By Emily Clark
18:20 September 24, 2008 PDT
Along with daughter Lucy, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking is planning to send his digitized DNA into space as part of NCsoft’s Operation Immortality. The pair hopes the exercise will help publicize the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics; a competition that will award $10 million to the first person or team that can sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less. Read More
MAVEN: NASA's post-Phoenix Mars probe
By Kyle Sherer
00:27 September 22, 2008 PDT
After the Phoenix lander has finished scraping away at Martian soil, the MAVEN spacecraft will examine the atmosphere of the red planet. The US$485 million Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN program is the second stage of NASA’s Mars Scout program, following the successful Phoenix mission. The MAVEN craft will study the planet’s atmospheric gases, upper atmosphere, solar wind, ionosphere, planetary corona, solar EUV and SEPS, and investigate past climate change. Read More
Thirty-eight people make reservations for space hotel
By Jude Garvey
06:52 August 22, 2008 PDT
Thirty eight travelers have made reservations to be the first guests on the Galactic Suite space hotel. The four day vacation will take passengers to a distance of 300 miles (450 kilometers) from the earth at a cost of €3 million (USD$4.46 million). Read More
SpaceShipTwo mothership revealed
12:19 August 4, 2008 PDT
Virgin Galactic has achieved another milestone in its push to become the world’s first private commercial spaceline with the unveiling of the WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) carrier aircraft. Built at the Scaled Composites facility in Mojave, California, the twin fuselage WK2 is a formidable engineering feat. It is the world’s largest all carbon composite aircraft and the main wing, which spans 140 ft, is the longest single carbon composite aviation component ever built. Christened “EVE” in honor of Sir Richard Branson's mother, the aircraft can can fly across the US non-stop and reach altitudes of 50,000 ft - the height from which SpaceShipTwo (SS2) will be air launched. Read More
New insight into Martian environment
By Kyle Sherer
10:27 July 18, 2008 PDT
NASA’s $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided groundbreaking insight into the environmental makeup of the planet during its earliest geological age. Images from the MRO reveal that the Red Planet was originally a muddy brown, with vast lakes and flowing rivers covering a predominantly clay surface. Read More
Google co-founder joins space tourism club
22:20 June 11, 2008 PDT
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has forked out a US$5 million deposit to reserve a seat on future orbital spaceflights and join the select group of private space tourists. Space Adventures, the company that helped Dennis Tito become the world’s first private astronaut in 2001, has also announced an agreement with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation (FSA) to launch a dedicated mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011. Read More
Touchdown! Phoenix spacecraft lands on Mars
By Kyle Sherer
19:07 May 25, 2008 PDT
May 26, 2008 NASA has announced the successful touchdown of the Phoenix spacecraft on arctic plains in the north of the Red Planet. The completion of the 10 month journey was confirmed with the detection of a radio signal from Phoenix (a signal which takes more than 15 minutes to reach Earth) indicating that it had reached the Martian surface. The spacecraft reached speeds of approximately 12,000 mph before entering the top of the planet's atmosphere and beginning its decent towards a soft touchdown on its three-legs made possible by parachute deployment and finally, the use of controlled thrusters. Launched on August 4, 2007, Phoenix is the sixth lander to touch down on Mars with only five of the 11 previous international attempts having succeeded including the first successful landing of the Viking program in 1976. Read More
Space engineers to explore next gen lunar rovers
20:03 April 30, 2008 PDT
May 1, 2008 The development of a new generation of lunar rovers has been given a boost thanks to funding for an exchange program between the Surrey Space Centre and the University of Beijing. The exchange will pave the way for future moon projects such as the UK‘s proposed Moonraker lander mission and the second phase of China's Chang'e programme. Read More
Electric solar sail moves closer to reality
23:22 April 15, 2008 PDT
April 16, 2008 It's a striking image made popular in sci-fi classics like the recent Star Wars films - a spacecraft hurtles through the galaxy propelled by gigantic reflective sails that use of solar radiation in place of on-board fuel . Space organizations around the world including NASA are pursuing this technology, but a rapidly evolving project from the Finnish Meteorological Institute has taken a radically different approach by using long metallic tethers and a solar-powered electron gun to create an "electric sail" that looks very different from the depictions of pressure sails with which we have become familiar. Read More
The Lynx: new player enters space-tourism race
22:46 March 27, 2008 PDT
March 28, 2008 Back in 2001 Californian millionaire Denis Tito made headlines as the worlds' first space tourist - shelling out around US$20 million for the privilege. Seven years on, the competition to offer such an out-of-this-world experience to a broader range of paying customers (and capitalize on what is expected to become a market worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade) is heating up. Earlier this year fledgling spaceline Virgin Galactic revealed designs for what will become its flagship -SpaceShipTwo, now Californian based XCOR Aerospace has unveiled a two-seater suborbital spaceship the size of a small private plane that the company expects to have airborne in 2010. Read More
Keith Lawhorn
- November 11, 2009 @ 03:07 UTC
