83803483
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MarkWhittington writes:
Planetary Resources, a company founded to mine asteroids for their bountiful resources, recently entered the Earth observation business. That entry has borne its first fruit with a memorandum of understanding between the company and the Bayer Company. Bayer has announced its intention of buying agricultural data from the Earth observation satellites that Planetary Resources will garner and sell them to its customer base.
83775499
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MarkWhittington writes:
According to a story in Time Magazine, China’s next moon mission will not be the previously announced Chang’e 4 landing on the far side of the moon, to take place in 2018, but a sample return mission to either the lunar South Pole or North Pole, designated as Chang’e 5, to take place in late 2017. The last Chinese lunar mission was the Chang’3 that landing on the lunar surface in late 2013.
83738373
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MarkWhittington writes:
Rep Louis Gohmert, R-Texas has caused a minor kerfuffle when he suggested that a future space colony ought to consist solely of heterosexual couples, especially if the idea is to restart the human race after a world-wide disaster, such as an asteroid strike. The Houston Chronicle took the conservative congressman to task with the implication of homophobia. NASA Watch has also taken up the hue and cry. However, both Gohmert and his critics are missing the point.
83716041
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MarkWhittington writes:
Sen Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, the venerable socialist who is currently giving Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee for president, fits by persisting in running, opened his mind on a variety of subjects, most notably NASA and space exploration. Sanders’ answer was interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which because it was at variance with previously stated positions. Has the candidate executed a flip-flop (or “evolved” as some might charitably say)? Or is he pandering to technology oriented California? Perhaps the explanation is that, being a man of advanced years, Sanders may have forgotten what his previous position was
83643613
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MarkWhittington writes:
It turns out that the mandate for NASA to return astronauts to the moon is not the most exciting part of the space agency’s funding bill now moving through the House. The same bill suggests that NASA start to research propulsion technologies that would be used to send the first probe to Alpha Centauri, according to a story in Science. The idea is that the first expedition to the nearest star to our solar system would depart in 2069, the 100th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The language seems to have been included in the bill by Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, the chair of the appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA.
83627231
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MarkWhittington writes:
Ars Technica reported that House version of the NASA funding bill for the next fiscal year will contain a complete change in the space agency’s space exploration strategy. The bill will defund NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, which proposes to snatch a boulder from an asteroid and deploy in in lunar orbit to be visited later by astronauts. Instead, the bill will mandate that the space agency begin plans to return to the lunar surface in advance of the Journey to Mars.
83604763
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MarkWhittington writes:
The latest Chinese space station, the Tiangong 2, is slated to be launched later in 2016 and will be visited by Chinese astronauts in a Shenzhou spacecraft. But, according to Spaceflight Insider, the Chinese are already looking ahead to their permanent low Earth orbit space facility, the Tiangong 3, slated to begin construction in 2018
83568651
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MarkWhittington writes:
Like an unquiet ghost from the sixties, Amitai Etzioni emerged in the pages of the Huffington Post to point a finger at NASA’s Journey to Mars and cry out that it must not be. He makes the arguments that robots can explore space much better and in greater safety than humans and that, in any case, we should be spending all that money on solving poverty. In so doing, Professor Etzioni shows that he has learned nothing since he published his long forgotten screed against the Apollo program, “Moondoggle,” which he incautiously mentioned.
83549697
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MarkWhittington writes:
One of the worlds that scientists are looking at with a view of exploring is the moon of Neptune Triton. Triton is a large moon, with a surface of nitrogen ice overlaying a crust of water ice. The mantle is icy as well, but the core is rock and iron. The moon has a tenuous atmosphere of nitrogen with traces of carbon monoxide and methane. Triton is thought to have been a Kuiper belt object similar to Pluto before being captured by Neptune in the distant past. One of the most exciting features that the moon has consists of geysers that shoot out nitrogen gas.
83523593
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MarkWhittington writes:
Just because NASA still does not have a plan or even a series of options of how it intends to send people to Mars does not mean that other people do not have their own ideas. A private company, an Apollo astronaut, and even a science fiction writer has weighed in with their own notions. Lockheed Martin would have people orbiting Mars by 2028. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, thinks NASA is going about going to Mars all wrong and would see the space agency scrap the Orion deep space craft and the heavy-lift Space Launch System and support some kind of private sector effort based on his Mars Cycler concept. Andy Weir, whose novel “The Martian” became a hit movie last year, does not go as far as Aldrin but does see a significant role for the private sector and international partners.
83521323
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MarkWhittington writes:
Nikkei Asian Review reports that Mitsubishi Electronics has won a contract to build the first Japanese lunar lander, slated for launch in 2019. The project will be a venture with the Japanese space agency JAXA and a number of Japanese universities and will cost $164 million. The lunar lander will demonstrate precision landing technology that can be used in future expeditions to the moon and Mars. The new technology will have a margin of error of 100 meters around its target. The lander will mass just 130 kilograms.
83496571
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MarkWhittington writes:
Space News reported that the House appropriations subcommittee that funds NASA has reported out a bill that provides the space agency with $19.5 billion for the next fiscal year, somewhat higher than the administration’s request. The bill also supports two of the pillars of NASA’s plans for deep space exploration, the Orion spacecraft and the heavy lift Space Launch System, at a much more generous level than the administration called for. Finally, the subcommittee allocated $260 million for a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. The last line item is not surprising. The subcommittee’s chair, Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, has been pushing for a Europa probe for years
83468273
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MarkWhittington writes:
It looks like the long-running Discovery Channel “Mythbusters” was cancelled far too soon. An American businessman living in Thailand named Paul Salo proposes to prove or disprove the 9/11 conspiracy theory once and for all. For this purpose, he is raising $1.5 million to buy a 767 or similar plane that is about to go out of service. He then proposes to crash it by remote control at 500 miles an hour into a building similar to one of the twin World Trade Center towers and then await results. The building needs to be in a remote location and already slated for demolition. Salo is selling “front row seats” at $5,000 a seat in an attempt to raise the money
83463045
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MarkWhittington writes:
A piece in SpaceWatch Middle East delves into the often discussed Chinese lunar exploration program that some suggest will culminate landing humans on the moon’s surface sometime in the 2030s. The article speculates that the Chinese will want international astronauts to participate, just as astronauts from a variety of countries have joined together on board the International Space Station. One of those astronauts may be from Iran, the article speculates.
83462435
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MarkWhittington writes:
Every year, the Science Fiction Writers of America gather in May to vote on and announce the Nebula Awards for best novel, novella, novelette, and short story published in the genre the previous year. The SFWA also votes on the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation. The winner for 2015 was “Mad Max: Fury Road” a reimagining of the Mad Max films that made Mel Gibson an international superstar in the early 1980s. The other major competitor was “That Martian” that was directed by Ridley Scott and starred Matt Damon as an astronaut marooned on Mars.
Brad Torgersen, a science fiction writer, published a lengthy essay on his blog that suggested that the pick shows a marked shift by the science fiction establishment from the way it used to regard the future.
