UPDATE - Watch the Virgin Galactic Unity 22 Spaceflight!

 UPDATE - Watch the Flight!

Watch the Richard Branson launching to space aboard his Virgin Galactic rocket plane...

Get Ready for Space Tourism! And maybe ballistic flight?

Virgin Galactic received regulatory approval to fly customers into space, moving the fledgling space tourism industry founded by billionaires one step closer to reality.

The Federal Aviation Administration upgraded the company’s existing license to cover customer flights, Virgin Galactic said Friday in a statement, saying the approval was the first of its kind. The company also confirmed that a May 22 test flight performed well against objectives. The approval marks another milestone for an industry that not long ago was the stuff of science fiction. Virgin Galactic, founded by entrepreneur Richard Branson, has been working toward its goal since 2004. Fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos plans his first trip in July, after auctioning a passenger seat for $28 million. The boss tweeted…

Perseverance Finds Interesting Rock on Martian Surface, Zaps It

The Nasa rover on Mars, Perseverance, found a weird rock that is confounding scientists. The rover’s Twitter account published an image of a weird, pockmarked rock. It has a smooth, greenish appearance and the caption underneath confirms that scientists are stumped. Perseverance zapped the rock with its on-board laser and is trying to learn more about it.

‘While the helicopter is getting ready, I can’t help checking out nearby rocks,’ the rover tweeted in the first person. ‘This odd one has my science team trading lots of hypotheses. ‘It’s about 6 inches (15 cm) long. If you look closely, you might spot the row of laser marks where I zapped it to learn more.’

It can identify the chemical and mineral makeup of targets as small as a pencil point from a distance of more than 20 feet (7 meters). In the picture, one can see the tiny indentations on the right side of the rock where the rover’s laser hit it.

Over the course of several years, Perseverance will collect and store up to 30 rock and soil samples that will eventually be returned to Earth where labs will analyze them.

Read the tweet from the robot here...

Mars Colony Progress Report - Not Good

Will we ever get to live on Mars? The Red Planet is a cold, dead place, with an atmosphere about 100 times thinner than Earth’s. The paltry amount of air that does exist on Mars is primarily composed of noxious carbon dioxide, which does little to protect the surface from the Sun’s harmful rays.

The average temperature on Mars is -81 degrees Fahrenheit (-63 degrees Celsius), with temperatures dropping as low as -195 degrees F (-126 degrees C). By contrast, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was at Vostok Station in Antarctica, at -128 degrees F (-89 degrees C) on June 23, 1982.

But interest in living on Mars persists. Evil Bond Villain Elon Musk and his SpaceX are anticipating colonies on Mars as early as the 2050s. Astrobiologist Lewis Darnell, a professor at the University of Westminster, makes a more modest estimate: about 50-100 years before “substantial numbers of people have moved to Mars to live in self-sustaining towns.” Crazily enough. the United Arab Emirates is aiming to build a Martian city of 600,000 occupants by 2117, in one of the more ambitious visions of the future.

November 2015 saw Administrator Bolden of NASA reaffirm the goal of sending humans to Mars. He laid out 2030 as the date of a crewed surface landing and noted that planned 2020 Mars rover would support the human mission.

Humans have made giant strides over recent years with robot rovers and space probes. But there is much to learn about getting people to Mars safely -- and within reasonable cost.

Read more here...

Global Mobil (cellular) Roaming via Satellite - with your current iPhone!

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ubiquitilink said, by employing a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, that pretty much any phone from the last decade should be able to text and do other low-bandwidth tasks from anywhere, even in the middle of the ocean or deep in the Himalayas.

The way the business would work is because the satellites operate on modified but mostly ordinary off-the-shelf software and connect to phones with no modifications necessary, Ubiquitilink will essentially be a worldwide roaming operator that mobile networks will pay to access.

Read more here...

New Spacesuit to go with New Spacecraft

Soon, astronauts from will use a new spacecraft, the Boeing Starliner. They will also utilize the Boeing Starliner Spacesuit, a cutting-edge backup system to the new craft, bringing more safety and comfort.

Thanks to advances in materials, it's 10 pounds lighter than the exit and reentry suits worn aboard the space shuttle, with the ability to let water vapor out yet keep air in. The new helmet and visor are integrated, the gloves are touchscreen-friendly to accommodate modern controls, and the joints are more flexible, letting the brave men and women who wear it move more freely.

See this at NASA...

From SlashDot,

A single underground deposit of ice on Mars contains about as much water as there is in Michigan's Lake Superior, according to new research from NASA. The deposit rests in the mid-northern latitudes of the Red Planet, specifically in the Utopia Planitia region. Discovered by the Shallow Subsurface Radar (SHARD) instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the deposit is "more extensive in area than the state of New Mexico," according to a NASA press release. It ranges in thickness from about 260 feet to about 560 feet, and has a composition that's 50 to 85 percent water ice, with what appears to be dust or larger rocky particles mixed in as well. None of the ice is exposed to the surface. At various points the dirt covering it is in between 3 and 33 feet thick.

Read more...

Frozen Embryos Could Lead to HyperSleep?

Read about a team of scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, who managed to completely pause their development, putting the blastocysts (very early embryos) in suspended animation for a month. What's more, they found that the process can put stem cells derived from the blastocysts in suspended animation as well, [and] the researchers were able to prove that the embryos can develop normally even after a pause in their growth. Team member Ramalho-Santos from the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research said... "To put it in perspective, mouse pregnancies only last about 20 days, so the 30-day-old 'paused' embryos we were seeing would have been pups approaching weaning already if they'd been allowed to develop normally." The implications for long-distance space travel are intriguing.

Commercial Space Travel to the Moon Approved

With a recently granted approval, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has given the go-ahead for the Moon Express mission to ferry a small lander to Luna in 2017. This sets a framework for other commercial expeditions to the moon, asteroids and Mars. According to the company, the spacecraft will carry a number of science experiments and commercial cargo on its one-way trip to the lunar surface, including cremated human remains, and will beam back pictures and video to Terra. This suggests the MX-1 mission will comply with the Outer Space Treaty.

Read more here...

Orbital Espresso? Yes, it is (ha ha) out of this world!

When astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti wants to satisfy the all-too-Italian craving for an espresso, she can so so the way many Earth-bound coffee drinkers do, with the push of a button. Ms. Cristoforetti, the seventh Italian and the first Italian woman to venture into orbit aboard the International Space Station, uses a specially designed machine to create the optimal coffee beverage, high above the rest of us.

LavAzza partnered with Italian space-food supplier Argotec to create the first-ever microgravity capsule brewer, to actually deliver the coffee-maker to the space station. The space station is pressurized to Earth sea level, keeping the boiling temperature of coffee the same as we know it. But there can be no coffee grounds loose, which, in microgravity would quickly dirty up the station. To keep the rig contained with no risk for shorting out delicate scientific equipment while someone tries to draw a delicious crema, the machine has been engineered to European Space Agency and NASA standards.

The an important deviation from sidling up to the bar at a café is that the coffee will be delivered into sealed packets, to contain the liquid.

Hmmm, delicious espresso! Read more here...

Commercial Space Flight for the Masses (well, the 1% of the masses)

SpaceShipTwo -- Virgin Galactic's rocket plane -- blasted off of its carrier plane for a second powered test, another step towards commercial trips for people to outer space. The rocket plane flew high above the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, deployed from the carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo. After a 45 minute flight, SpaceShipTwo was released and glided back to the airport. It counted as SpaceShipTwo's 52nd flight and WhiteKnightTwo's 156th.

In January, SpaceShipTwo blasted off for a powered test and sailed through a follow-up glide flight; the bird is expected to go through a series of glide flights and powered flights that eventually rise beyond the boundary of outer space (60 miles or 100 kilometers in altitude, approximately). Virgin's billionaire founder, Richard Branson, could fly into space later this year depending on how flight tests go. More than 700 people have paid up to $250,000 each to take a ride once Virgin Galactic begins commercial service.

Interplanetary Internet -- space-based IP Traffic would enable Mars-based Internet connection

Working with NASA and JPL, Vint Cerf has helped develop a new set of protocols that can stand up to the unique environment of space, where orbital mechanics and the speed of light make traditional networking extremely difficult. Though this space-based network is still in its early stages and has few nodes, he said that we are now at “the front end of what could be an evolving and expanding interplanetary backbone.”

The evolution of space data system standards has gone on in parallel with the evolution of the Internet, with conceptual cross-pollination where fruitful, but largely as a separate evolution. Since the late 1990s, familiar Internet protocols and CCSDS space link protocols have integrated and converged in several ways. While IP-like protocols are feasible for short hops -- from a ground station to orbiter, rover-to-lander, etc. -- delay-tolerant networking is needed to get information from one region of the solar system to another. It becomes apparent that the concept of a "region" is a natural architectural factoring of the InterPlanetary Internet.

Mr Cerf sums up the problem thusly, "...the speed of light is slow relative to distances in the solar system. A one-way radio signal from Earth to Mars takes between three and half and 20 minutes. So round trip time is of course double that. And then there’s the other problem: planetary rotation. If you’re communicating with something on the surface of the planet, it goes out of communication as the planet rotates. It breaks the available communications and you have to wait until the planet rotates back around again. So what we have is variable delay and disruption, and TCP does not do terribly well in those kinds of situations."

The Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) program establishes a long-term, readily accessible communications test-bed onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Two other components will serve as communications test computers that transmit messages between ISS and ground Mission Control Centers.

Read more at Wired and more info at NASA.

Relativistic Speeds Unlikely. Again.

Warping space, a la Star Trek, or jumping into hyperspace (Star Wars, and many other SciFi stories) remains an elusive proposition. Einstein was just too smart for us -- as research on super dense collapsed stars shows.

An international research team recently used a collection of large radio and optical telescopes to investigate a pulsar and its white dwarf companion. The observations revealed a binary stellar system with unusual properties: a pulsar that weighs twice as much as our star (Sol, the sun), making it the most massive neutron star measure to date. This, in combination with its short orbital period of only 2.5 hours, and serves as a laboratory of sorts for the theory of general relativity in extreme conditions.

Research findings are also important for scientists who search for gravitational waves. On Earth, they are using large detectors, like the laser interferometers GEO600, LIGO and VIRGO. One of the key signals they are looking for in their data are the gravitational waves emitted by two neutron stars during those last few minutes when they quickly spiral towards each other and finally collide. Decades of mathematical research in general relativity were necessary to calculate the expected gravitational waves from such a collision.

Branson Leaps Ahead in Commercial Space Travel!

Totally awesome - Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne win the X Prize and is the first civilian reusable space launch/recovery, then


Richard Branson teams up for civilian low orbit travel, now,

Virgin Galactic announce "...the next step of the Galactic journey: revolutionary new satellite launch vehicle LauncherOne. The pieces are all in place to transform the business of satellite launch, which will open up space to everyone."

Read more about the next leap forward...



- Posted by Tom/Bluedog

Discovery flies over Washington DC on decommissioning

Another milestone in air-space history -- the Discovery comes to the museum annex at Dulles (IAD). Get outside and watch the overflight.

"Space Shuttle Discovery to Fly Over Goddard En Route to Virginia 
On Tuesday, April 17, bring your lawn chairs and picnic blankets to the Goddard Mall (grass area in front of Building 8) at 10:00 a.m. for a celebration of human spaceflight as we watch Space Shuttle Discovery fly over Goddard’s Greenbelt campus. The flight is contingent upon weather, so check the Center-wide e-mail that will be disseminated the morning of Tuesday, April 17 for confirmation of the event and additional event details. The flyover is expected to occur by 11:00 a.m. " 

Atlantis final mission

End of an era - the space shuttle Atlantis is to be decommissioned after completing its latest mission STS-132. The shuttle launched on May 14, 2010, returning on May 26, 2010.

The shuttle was originally a pretty cool idea then co-opted by the military-industrial complex (i.e., the air force and intelligence community). As a 'limited reuse' vehicle, the program has been the U.S.'s sole foothold in space for quite some time. With no replacement even on the drawing board, i suspect my children won't be witnessing much more in the way of cool American ingenuity.

Heros - in short supply these days. Sigh.