Space

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called the International Space Station Monday to mark the 49th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's launch on the first manned space flight, suggesting an international space summit to discuss future cooperative ventures on the high frontier.

"Space is our highest priority, regardless of how hard the economic situation is in the country," Medvedev said in translated remarks. "Space will always remain our priority. This is not just somebody's interpretation, it's our official state position."

"We want to thank you again for today's holiday," station … Read more

All smokers smell. All buses are late. All politicians are mendacious narcissists.

Some things in life are so truly self-evident that they require no discussion. Which is why I was thrust into prehistoric hysteria by a piece of research that declared only 20 percent of the world's population believes that green people are already in our midst and enjoying our Corn Flakes.

According to Ipsos, the fine researchers of markets terrestrial and celestial, the majority of the world is still unwilling to accept that aliens are already here and disguised as us.

And by "disguised as us", … Read more

One week before President Obama is scheduled to attend a major "space summit" in Florida, NASA unveiled sweeping new programs Thursday designed to implement the administration's proposed shift to commercial manned rockets and development of new technologies to enable eventual deep space exploration.

The president's fiscal 2011 budget request, which would cancel the Bush administration's Constellation moon program, does not specify a long-range target for manned exploration or a timetable for moving beyond low-Earth orbit, factors that have generated widespread criticism.

But NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former shuttle commander, defended the agency's new … Read more

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Houston--Commander Alan Poindexter, manually flying Discovery from the shuttle's aft flight deck, guided the space plane to a precision docking with the International Space Station early Wednesday after performing a flawless, "radar-failed" rendezvous.

Approaching from directly in front of the space station, Discovery engaged its payload bay docking mechanism with its counterpart on the front end of the space station's forward Harmony module at 3:44 a.m. EDT as the two spacecraft sailed 220 miles above the Caribbean at 5 miles per second.

"Houston and station, capture confirmed," pilot James … Read more

The shuttle Discovery, carrying a seven crew members and 10 tons of supplies and equipment bound for the International Space Station, rocketed into orbit early Monday to kick off a three-spacewalk resupply mission.

With its three hydrogen-fueled main engines throttled up to full power, Discovery's twin solid-fuel boosters ignited with a crackling roar at 6:21 a.m. EDT, instantly pushing the spacecraft away from pad 39A.

Fifteen minutes before liftoff, the space station sailed 220 miles above the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, shining like a brilliant "star" as it streaked away to the northeast.

Discovery'… Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--A Russian Soyuz spacecraft roared to life and rocketed away from its launching pad in Kazakhstan early Friday, carrying two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut on a two-day flight to the International Space Station.

Soyuz TMA-18 commander Alexander Skvortsov, flight engineer Mikhail Kornienko and Tracy Caldwell Dyson, a shuttle veteran with a doctorate in chemistry, lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 12:04 a.m. EDT Friday.

During the climb to space through a cloudless blue sky, television views from inside the capsule showed Skvortsov, seated in the center, flanked by Kornienko on his left … Read more

Psyched for a long, long trip to Mars but can't stand the wait for someone to actually mount such a mission? The next best thing might well be to lock yourself in an isolation chamber in Moscow.

The European Space Agency is gearing up for exactly that. As part of its Mars500 project, the ESA will be conducting a 520-day earthbound sojourn at Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems starting this summer. At that time, the six participants in the simulated mission will sequester themselves in a mock interplanetary spaceship, with complementary mock Martian lander.

The endurance exercise, originally … Read more

NASA's rover Opportunity is getting smarter through software.

Celebrating its seventh year investigating the surface of the Red Planet, Opportunity is now able to make its own choices about which rocks it should investigate further and which ones it should leave alone, according to a NASA report on Tuesday.

Thanks to a new software upload, Opportunity's computer can analyze the photos taken with its wide-angle camera and isolate rocks that meet specific criteria. It can then determine whether specific rocks are worthy of close-up shots through its narrow-angle, color-filtered camera.

The new software called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering … Read more

The U.K. has launched a national space agency dedicated to coordinating its involvement in civilian spaceflight, with responsibility for overseeing policy and budgets.

The agency, which officially begins work April 1, will negotiate on the U.K.'s behalf with international bodies. In addition, it will take over responsibility for some key U.K. and European space projects, including Galileo, the U.K. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said in a statement Tuesday.

The U.K. Space Agency has been set up to help spur growth in the British space and satellite industry, which employs 68,000 workers … Read more