After a high-profile, media-free opening of its Seattle area office in 2015, SpaceX has been rather circumspect about its plans to build and launch a satellite constellation to provide global broadband access. Until this week, that is. On Tuesday, SpaceX’ officially pulled the cover off of its plans in the form of an application filed […]
Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the U.S. presidential election has raised a number of interesting questions regarding what substantive changes, if any, may be coming in the way of American space policy. Whereas Hillary Clinton’s transition team was reportedly prepared to show up at NASA headquarters when the doors opened the morning after her victory, […]
The journal Nature has published a fascinating paper which provides convincing evidence that the Moon’s axis shifted by roughly 5 degrees some 3 billion years ago. What makes the work more than a matter of scientific curiosity however, is the fact that the shift was traced by using data from a variety of spacecraft to […]
From the European Southern Observatory: The Very Large Telescope Interferometer at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile has obtained the sharpest view ever of the dusty disc around an aging star. For the first time such features can be compared to those around young stars — and they look surprisingly similar. It is even possible that […]
Dawn of New Era : KSC Clock Adds Up the Minutes of the First SpaceX Launch to ISS If Project Constellation was the clear victim of President Obama’s Kennedy Space Center address, the immediate beneficiary was without a doubt the International Space Station program. Slated for de-orbit as soon as 2016 in some Constellation planning […]
The GAO has released a new report, which is harshly critical of NASA’s accounting procedures for the Space Launch System, Orion spacecraft, and the ground systems being built to handle them. The report, which was requested by retiring Senator Tom Coburn, a frequent critic of government overspending, is not so much an examination of the […]
Image Credit: ESO The European Southern Observatory at La Silla released this image of a glowing hydrogen cloud, or nebula, Gum 41. The glow is caused by the searing radiation emitted by young, very hot stars which excites the hydrogen gas left over from star formation. This nebula is in the constellation Centaurus in the […]
Fox News ran a special entitled “Surrendering America” several times over the last weekend in March. Three of the four segments covered control of the internet, defense spending and energy production, with the theme somewhat predictably being that under the Obama Administration, the U.S. is consciously “retreating” or failing to adequately protect its own interests […]
A very interesting solicitation from NASA suggests the agency is sticking its toe in the water a little further in incorporating commercial capabilities into its long-term plans. Titled Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities, the NASA synopsis, which is calling for unfunded Space Act Agreements, begins with: ” NASA encourages innovative and entrepreneurial efforts within the private sector to develop new space-related […]
In a lecture delivered to the Royal Aeronautical Society on November 16, SpaceX Founder Elon Musk revealed a few more details about the company’s next engine project, and seemingly summed up the future this way: “Its gonna be methane.” The transition to a methane fueled engine marks a logical and necessary step in developing a cost efficient Mars transportation […]
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