There has never been any doubt that space travel is not the leisure of choice for everyone. Despite the fact that some of the world’s richest people do not hesitate to pay incredible amounts of money to get a seat on yet unproven space vehicles, the majority of the population will probably never really cherish the idea of undergoing high [...]
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NASA’s New Budget
At NASA these days, money is the talk of the town. On April 10, Us President Obama released his budget request for fiscal year 2014, including the NASA budget. This is just the start of the process: the budget doesn’t reflect the actual funds that will be allocated to NASA, this is just the official ask. Here is NASA’s official [...]
Flying to Mars on a Fusion Rocket
One of the most challenging aspects of sending humans to Mars is the duration of the flight that takes them there: over 500 days of putting up with the same crewmates while being barraged by cosmic radiation. It’s enough to make anyone stay in Earth orbit. But a group of researchers at the University of Washington is determined to go [...]
Is It Space Junk? Texan Electrician Finds Mysterious Sphere in his Backyard
By Tereza Pultarova and Dean Gentz It was late February 2013 when Dean Gentz, an American electrician, spotted a strange object in his cow pasture near the tiny town of Buna, east Texas. First, he didn’t pay any special attention to it thinking it was most probably just another toy his nephews and nieces had left around. When he finally decided to [...]
Flying into Volcanoes for Flight Safety
Source: NASA NASA Earth science researchers last month traveled to Turrialba Volcano, near San Jose, Costa Rica, to fly a Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) — a small electric aircraft equipped with cameras and sensors — into the volcano’s sulfur dioxide plume and over its summit crater, to study Turrialba’s chemical environment. The project is designed to improve the [...]
XCOR Fires Piston Pump Rocket Engine
XCOR Aerospace released the following statement on March 26, accompanying a video of the 67 second test. Mojave, California - XCOR Aerospace today announced a first in aviation and space history, the firing of a full piston pump-powered rocket engine. This breakthrough is the foundation for fully reusable spacecraft that can fly multiple times per day, every day. It is a [...]
Space: Securing Communications with Quantum Teleportation
Developments in quantum entanglement research may mean satellites hold the key to encrypting communications here on Earth – using a preliminary form of teleportation. “If we can use correlations between entangled photons to establish a quantum key, it could be used for secure communications,” University of Waterloo associate professor Thomas Jennewein told Scientific American. A quantum key occurs when two entangled quanta, such as two [...]
US Space Budgets: Three Weeks into Sequestration
After months spent attempting to unravel the US budget knot, Congressional hopes to reach a balanced budget balance were, once more, disappointed last month with the legislature’s failure to pass a budget and prevent sequestration. Funding of federal agencies will stop as of March 27, according to the spending bill approved on October 1, 2012. Governmental agencies like NASA will [...]
A Day Late, ISS Expedition 34 Crew Makes Perfect Landing
International Space Station Expedition 34 crewmembers Kevin Ford, Evgeny Tarelkin, and Oleg Novitskiy had expected to be back on Earth on March 15. But bad weather at their landing site forced the crew to postpone their homecoming. One day later, the trio landed their Soyuz TMA-06M on the Kazakh steppe in the midst of fog in freezing winter temperatures. On [...]
CASIS Announces Grants for Protein Crystal Experiments
By Edward Wright A researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Center tells us that only about 200 proteins have been studied in space. It is estimated that the human body contains more than 2,000,000 proteins.These proteins are encoded by fewer than 25,000 genes. While the Human Genome Project was a major undertaking, the Human Proteome Project (which is just now getting [...]
