The growing cloud of space junk surrounding the Earth is a hazard to spaceflight, and will only get worse as large pieces of debris collide and fragment. NASA space scientists have hit on a new way to manage the mess: Use mid-powered lasers to nudge space junk off collision courses. (more)
Forget the mile-high club. Who’s joined the million-mile high club? (more)
If you have the millions to spare and the derring-do, your chances of being strapped in and launched to the international space station improved markedly Wednesday when two major companies agreed to join forces to make space travel significantly more available. (more)
Before the year is out, SpaceX will likely have conducted the first orbital demonstration of the Dragon capsule, which is intended to transport cargo, and ultimately humans, to the International Space Station (ISS). Next year, Orbital Sciences is expected to launch its cargo vessel, Cygnus. By 2014, two more spacecraft, the Dream Chaser and CST-100 are on track to have maiden voyages, launched by the Sierra Nevada Corporation and Boeing, respectively. And even more spacecraft are being developed by companies such as Blue Origin and PlanetSpace, as well as suborbital vehicles being built by Virgin Galactic, XCOR, and others. (more)
Call it “American Idol” in space: NASA has launched a new contest that allows the public to pick – or even create – wake-up songs for astronauts flying on the agency’s two final space shuttle missions. (more)
Astronauts who spend months in space become as physically weak as 80-year-olds, a study has found. (more)
A cargo vessel which failed to dock with the International Space Station is under control, a Russian space agency official has said. (more)
In February, the Obama administration announced its fiscal year budget, which proposed to eliminate the NASA human space flight program, called Constellation, and instead rely on the commercial space industry and other countries to ferry future astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). (more)
AFP – There is no room for romance on board the cozy confines of the International Space Station, a NASA space shuttle commander said Monday when asked what would happen if astronauts had sex in space. (more)
NASA is getting hit up for extra launch passes, and mission stickers and pins are flying off the shelf. Another Twittering crowd is descending on the space center. Even science fiction writers want in on the action. (more)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Space shuttle Discovery is back on Earth. (more)
They’ve lived with each other for extended periods of time in very close quarters, but that doesn’t mean America’s astronauts see eye-to-eye. (more)
Those who have had the honor to work in and around the White House understand that in reality, the president has a limited and shrinking power-base. Every day and in almost every way, Congress seeks to weaken that base while transferring more of the executive branch authority to its own body. (more)
Astronauts moved a cargo module the size of a mini bus the short distance from space shuttle Discovery’s payload bay to the International Space Station’s (ISS) Harmony node Thursday morning, setting the stage for a carefully choreographed ballet to begin transferring tons of supplies and equipment to and from and the orbiting laboratory (more)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Discovery’s astronauts surveyed their ship Tuesday for signs of launch damage, but the job was complicated by the failure of the space shuttle’s big dish antenna. (more)
The space shuttle Discovery is on its way to the International Space Station following a successful liftoff early Monday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. (more)
A Russian Soyuz space capsule carrying a U.S. astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut from the International Space Station landed safely in Kazakhstan on Thursday. (more)
Fifteen House Republicans are now calling on the Obama administration to appoint a team of NASA experts to study the president’s latest space budget request. (more)
When archaeologists unearth the relics of the American Century, the space race will be our Holy Grail. Space was our New World. In 1962, when John F. Kennedy declared “we choose to go to the moon,” he encouraged every American to look up to the stars and summon the spirit of Columbus staring across the Atlantic. During the Apollo program every American taxpayer became a deckhand on the voyage to the moon. It was a journey that created the world we now live in, spawning GPS systems, plastics, alloy metals, cordless power tools and cancer detecting CAT scans (more)
The White House is launching a political counterattack to fend off escalating congressional criticism of its proposals to outsource U.S. manned space missions to private industry. (more)
