Kennedy Space Center released the following newsletter today, giving a good synopsis of recent progress in the Commercial Crew Program, which it manages. Of particular note, the real action will come later this year, first with a pad abort test, and later, an in-flight abort test of the Dragon crew vehicle. KSC News Release NASA […]
Image Credit: SpaceX/Youtube SpaceX released the following statement with the video Friday evening. Several hours later, FOX News ran a special segment “Surrendering America” which focused in part on the decline of the American space program. Perhaps they should have checked youtube first. SpaceX statement: SpaceX successfully test fired the first stage of F9R—an advanced […]
Note: Even as members of a House Science Committee were arguing about the who is responsible for America’s inability to launch its own astronauts, the crew of Expedition 39 made its delayed docking to ISS, bringing the station’s compliment back up to six. From NASA.gov: A new trio of Expedition 39 flight engineers has arrived […]
The absolute rift in American space policy, and the embarrassing dysfunction which has been the result, was on full display Thursday in a U.S. House of Representatives Science committee hearing on the FY 2015 budget request featuring testimony by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. With the meeting taking place in the face of increased criticism of […]
Image Credit JPL JPL News Release: Late afternoon lighting produced a dramatic shadow of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity photographed by the rover’s rear hazard-avoidance camera on March 20, 2014. The shadow falls across a slope called the McClure-Beverlin Escarpment on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity is investigating rock layers for evidence […]
Researchers in Spain with the Spanish National Resource Council have discovered a means of harvesting infrared radiation and concerting it into electricity using silicone solar cells. Abstract from Nature Communications: “Silicone is the material of choice for visible light photodetection and solar cell fabrication. However, due to the intrinsic band gap properties of silicon, most […]
Shockwave/ Image Credit SpaceX It’s not a launch order yet, but Space News reports that SpaceX has received a $4.2 million contract from the Air Force to study payload integration on the Falcon 9 V1.1 for an undisclosed satellite. Although the Air Force was supposed to set aside 14 launch opportunities for open bidding through […]
NASA News Release: NASA released Thursday an image of a comet that, on Oct. 19, will pass within 84,000 miles of Mars — less than half the distance between Earth and our moon. The image on the left, captured March 11 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, shows comet C/2013 A1, also called Siding Spring, […]
Earlier this week, a classified National Reconnaissance Office mission aboard an Atlas V was delayed into April due to a fire which broke out in an Air Force downrange radar tracking station “near” Cape Canaveral. Overnight, SpaceX confirmed that the same problem has forced a new delay in the SpaceX-3, Dragon resupply mission to the […]
Time lapse photo showing movement On the third episode of the re-tooled COSMOS, Neil deGrasse Tyson took his ship of the imagination to the Oort cloud to discover the origin of comets. He may have to go back. Astronomers have discovered a second dwarf planet orbiting in the far reaches of the solar system, well […]
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