A report in Florida Today indicates that the State of Florida’s plan to secure a long-term commercial spaceport independent from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the U.S. Air Force Eastern Test Range have been dealt a potentially serious blow. In a letter addressed to Florida Lieutenant Governor Jennifer Carrol, NASA rebuffed Florida’s request to transfer former state land, purchased by NASA in the […]
Source: JPL Launched in 2005 aboard an Atlas V 401, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided a wealth of information regarding the presence of water ice on the Red Planet. In an article (abstract) published Sunday in Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers analyzing data from MRO’s CRISM instrument (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer), which was used to image […]
Source: Russianspaceweb.com The year 2012 was a difficult one for the Russian space program, which ended on a sour note when its workhorse Proton boosted placed a Yamal-402 satellite in the wrong orbit. It was eventually boosted to the correct orbit using onboard fuel, albeit at a cost to its expected lifespan. This came on the heals of […]
Source: Chosun Media South Korea will try once again to launch its beleaguered KSLV rocket, with another attempt tentatively scheduled for late January. The rocket, which is also called Naro, has suffered two previous flight failures. The third and final vehicle under the collaborative program which features a Russian liquid fueled first stage and a Korean solid fuel second stage, was originally scheduled to launch […]
At a press conference held in Bigelow Aerospace headquarters, NASA Deputy administrator Lori Garver and Bigelow founder and chairman Robert Bigelow formally announced the partnership arrangement revealed last week by SpaceNews, one which had been in the works for nearly 2 years. Under the terms, NASA will pay Bigelow $17.8 million for a two-year test of its BEAM, Bigelow Expanded Activity Module, […]
Another amazing image from the European Southern Observatory, this one taken from the 2.2 meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The image shows a stellar nursery in the cloud Lupus 3, 5 light years across and located 600 light years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. The coffee colored cloud is host to a […]
Source: Rianovosti, Russianspaceweb In another sign that after years of decay and delays, Russia is serious about revamping its space infrastructure, Vladimir Popovkin announced today that his agency Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, will launch a lunar orbiter mission in 2015 aboard a Soyuz-2. Scheduled to lift off out of the yet to be completed Vostochny space launch complex in the […]
Source: RIA Novosti The Russian space agency Roscosmos released a document Saturday prioritizing space goals through 2020. The plan, which was apparently approved in December, calls for a $69 billion investment and continues the focus on consolidating the sprawling space infrastructure into a much smaller number of holding companies with the ultiamte goal of attracting commercial investment. New starts in human spaceflight […]
Space.com is reporting that NASA and Bigelow Aerospace have reached an agreement which will allow the North Las Vegas company to fly its proposed BEAM, Bigelow Aerospace Expanded Module to the International Space Station, where it would to provide extra storage space, similar to that provided by the Permanent Multi Purpose Logistics Module. Assuming the agreement, which is […]
NASA held a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center yesterday to re-cap last year’s progress on the Commercial Crew Program and to look ahead at the agenda for 2013. Present were NASA Commercial Spaceflight Development director Phil McCalister, NASA Commercial Crew program director Ed Mango, and representatives of Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada, Boeing and SpaceX, as well as NASA […]
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