Early last week, news media reported that NASA has terminated its Space Act Agreement with the B612 Foundation due its failure to meet specified milestones, namely beginning development of the $350-$450 million Sentinel mission. B612 was founded by former astronauts Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickert, for the purpose of raising awareness about asteroid defense by funding […]
Deployed! Image Credit The Planetary Society It was hard won, but after series of scares involving low battery readings, software glitches and communication dropouts, the Planetary Society has declared its cubesat based LightSail experiment a success. The 3U cubesat launched into space as a secondary payload aboard an Atlas V on May 20th, the same […]
Image Credit: Lunar Mission One Lunar Mission One, a private effort aimed at drilling at least 20 meters deep into the Moon’s South pole was announced in London today. As with an increasing number of missions, inital funding is being sought through a crowd-sourced KickStarter campaign. In this case key incentives are a digital memory […]
Increasingly often we report on new space projects funded or performed either in full or in part by crowd sourcing. It is perhaps only appropriate that one of the most powerful sources of inspiration for many in the space community, as well as in popular culture, is the subject of its own Kickstarter campaign. Star […]
Two Mars related stories. First, Uwingo, the crowd-sourced Mars funding site started which is attempting to raise $10 million this year to support research grants for Mars exploration has unveiled a new campaign. According to the announcement: “Uwingu presents the first opportunity for a shout-out from the people of Earth to Mars with personal messages […]
NASA’s JPL has a news story about the the possible discovery of interstellar dust particles trapped in aerogel designed just for just that purpose and included aboard the appropriately named Stardust space probe. Stardust flew through the tail of the comet Wild 2 in 2004, returning its samples to Earth the next year in the […]
We’ve seen elements of the story before; a team of experts, some long in the tooth, are put together in order to contact a long derelict spacecraft in hopes of averting disaster. Other times the old probe comes back with a new mission, aka V’Ger or its equally confused predecessor NOMAD. One way or another, […]
The quickly expanding list of privately funded space ventures added a new name this week, The Boldly Go Institute, and its goals are worthy of the name. Headlined by Dr. Jon Morse, Dr. Laurie Leshin and Dr. Scott Parazynski, all NASA veterans, the institute seeks to step in where NASA is falling short with big […]
China’s Jade Rabbit may have company yet. After a slow start which saw many of the teams stymied by the multiple challenges of putting together a credible entry in the Google Lunar X-Prize contest. GLXP altered the rules last year to allow for the insertion of milestone prizes totaling $6 million aimed at helping leading […]
Radio Free Internet? The cubesat revolution it would seem, is just beginning. And if a bold plan announced on Monday comes to fruition, it might just lead to revolution of the rather messy kind. The Outernet project, a creation of the non-profit New York based Media Development Investment Fund, seeks to develop and deploy a […]
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