Congress wary of fully funding commercial crew
Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com
Senate and House budget bills would cut up to 40 percent from NASA's requested budget to pay for new commercial spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and end U.S. reliance on Russia for crew transportation. The Senate's appropriations subcommittee for NASA marked up a spending plan with $525 million allocated for commercial crew. The House's budget calls for the program to receive $500 million in fiscal year 2013, which begins Oct. 1. The budget proposals were released April 17 and April 19, and the bills still must be passed by each body of Congress, and their differences must be resolved in a joint conference committee. NASA expects any significant reduction from the agency's requested $830 million for commercial crew development to push back the resumption of domestic human space travel into low Earth orbit, a capability lost after the retirement of the space shuttle.
SpaceX flight preps continue with fueling, engine hotfire
Stephen Clark - SpaceflightNow.com
While engineers analyze and tweak software coding, SpaceX will continue making physical preparations to the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 booster for a commercial launch to the International Space Station as soon as May 7, officials said Tuesday. Managers on Tuesday officially reset the flight's target launch date to May 7. The precise launch opportunity will be at 9:38 a.m. EDT (1338 GMT). SpaceX could make a second launch attempt May 10 if officials are comfortable with flying the Dragon mission before the arrival of three astronauts aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
SpaceX plans historic first flight on May 7
Agence France Presse
SpaceX confirmed it plans to launch a rocket and capsule on May 7 in a historic first flight of a private spaceship to the International Space Station. The new launch date, coming a week later than an initially planned April 30 goal, comes after SpaceX said Monday it needed to complete more testing on its unmanned Dragon capsule. The capsule is due to ride on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. "NASA and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station have approved SpaceX's request to set May 7th as the target launch date for the upcoming COTS 2 mission," SpaceX spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham told AFP.
Space shuttle Enterprise's trip to New York delayed until Friday
Trip from Washington, D.C., put off for second time
Larry Mcshane - New York Daily News
The space shuttle Enterprise will need two more days to make it from Washington to New York. The planned trip north was scrubbed for the second time this week because of weather woes, with the future museum piece now due to hit town Friday, officials announced. The shuttle was initially expected to arrive Monday, but that trip was rescheduled to Wednesday because of inclement weather. Additional concerns led to the Friday flight plan, when the forecast is for mostly sunny skies with no precipitation.
NASA aims for Friday flight for Enterprise
James Dean - Florida Today
NASA has again pushed back Enterprise’s ferry flight to New York City because of uncertain weather. Now, the space agency is tentatively targeting Friday. Managers made the decision after a weather briefing Tuesday, saying that a large region of low pressure dominating the East Coast continued to make forecasting difficult. Conditions on Friday are expected to be more stable.
NASA's prototype space shuttle Enterprise now aims for Friday landing in New York
Robert Pearlman - collectSPACE.com
Grounded for more than 25 years as a museum display, the space shuttle Enterprise will need to wait just a few more days before taking to the air for one last flight. The prototype NASA orbiter, which never flew in space but was used by the space agency for approach and landing tests in the late 1970s, will now take off from Washington, D.C. for New York no sooner than Friday, if the weather cooperates. "A large region of low pressure dominating the east coast has made it difficult to reliably predict an acceptable day for the flight," NASA said in a statement released after a meeting held Tuesday morning (April 24) to reassess the weather forecast. "Managers now are tentatively targeting the flight for Friday, April 27, weather permitting."
Company unveils plans for asteroid mining
William Harwood - CBS News
Planetary Resources Inc. hopes to turn science fiction into reality with plans to identify near-Earth asteroids loaded with ice, precious metals and other raw materials and then to send robotic landers to selected targets to carry out mining operations. The idea is to return valuable ores to Earth or to convert water into rocket fuel to dramatically lower the cost of deep space exploration, company officials said Tuesday. Despite the audacious nature of the company's goal, co-founder Eric Anderson told an enthusiastic crowd of supporters at the Museum of Flight in Seattle that Planetary Resources is serious, saying "this company is not about paper studies."
New venture aims to mine near-Earth asteroids
Joel Achenbach - Washington Post
Asteroids have made people nervous for several decades now, ever since scientists declared that a large object from space smashed into Earth 65 million years ago and put the kibosh on the Age of Dinosaurs. But now some entrepreneurs and tech tycoons are declaring that there’s money in those space rocks. Don’t fear them, they say. Mine them. Untold thousands of asteroids the size of warehouses orbit the sun near Earth, and some of them are enticingly rich in water and precious metals. The water could be processed to create fuel depots for spaceships, not to mention beverages for astronauts. The metals, including platinum, could be mined and brought back to Earth.
Start-Up Outlines Asteroid-Mining Strategy
Amir Efrati - Wall Street Journal
A start-up with high-profile backers on Tuesday unveiled its plan to send robotic spacecraft to remotely mine asteroids, a highly ambitious effort aimed at opening up a new frontier in space exploration. At an event at the Seattle Museum of Flight, a group that included former National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials unveiled Planetary Resources Inc. and said it is developing a "low-cost" series of spacecraft to prospect and mine "near-Earth" asteroids for water and metals, and thus bring "the natural resources of space within humanity's economic sphere of influence." The solar system is "full of resources, and we can bring that back to humanity," said Planetary Resources co-founder Peter Diamandis, who helped start the X-Prize competition to spur nongovernmental space flight.
Startup aims to cull space rocks' rich resources
Asteroid-mining company says move will open solar system
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
A small asteroid mining company, backed by high-tech billionaire investors, aims to launch robotic spacecraft on prospecting missions within two years and then expeditions to extract water and precious metals from resource-rich space rocks within a decade. The resulting orbital industry is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue while opening up the solar system to human exploration, officials said Tuesday. Simply said, Planetary Resources Inc., a Seattle-based company, plans to turn science fiction into science fact.
Deep-pocket dreamers aim high with space mining
A group of wealthy entrepreneurs unveiled a new Bellevue-based company Tuesday with the goal of extracting platinum, gold and other valuable resources from asteroids
Sandi Doughton - Seattle Times
Space mining has been a longtime staple of science-fiction films — and the companies are almost always the villains. The transport ship in "Alien" was towing a load of ore when sinister, corporate overlords diverted it into the clutches of the galaxy's baddest monster. "Avatar" was all about saving the inhabitants of Pandora from thugs clawing their home planet to shreds in search of "unobtanium." Nevertheless, a group of entrepreneurs received a hero's reception Tuesday in Seattle, when they unveiled a new company with the goal of extracting platinum, gold and other valuable resources from asteroids. Director James Cameron, who dreamed up the evil miners of "Avatar," is among the project's supporters.
Company to Create 'Gas Stations' in Space
Suzanne Presto - Voice of America
A company based in the northwestern United States called Planetary Resources says it plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for raw materials, ranging from water to precious metals. Planetary Resources' co-founder Peter Diamandis is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, medical doctor and CEO of the X Prize Foundation. Speaking at a news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, Diamandis said he has wanted to be an asteroid miner since he was a teenager.
Asteroid mining venture aims to lay foundation with small, cheap space telescopes
Dan Leone - Space News
Planetary Resources, a billionaire-backed company that aims to mine asteroids for water and precious metals, says it will set the stage for this grand endeavor by building and launching a series of small, low-cost space telescopes, the first of which it intends to launch in 18-24 months. The space telescope will be based on the same design Planetary Resources will eventually use for its asteroid-prospecting spacecraft: a 30-kilogram to 50-kilogram flier packed with imaging sensors and a laser-optical communication system the company is developing to avoid encumbering its spacecraft with large antennas.
Asteroids may yield precious metals, cosmic riches
Donna Blankinship & Seth Borenstein - Associated Press
Using space-faring robots to mine precious metals from asteroids almost sounds easy when former astronaut Tom Jones describes it — practically like clearing a snow-covered driveway. Jones, an adviser to a bold venture that aims to extract gold, platinum and rocket fuel from the barren space rocks, said many near-Earth asteroids have a loose rocky surface held together only weakly by gravity. "It shouldn't be too hard to invent a machine like a snow blower to pick up material," explained Jones, a veteran of four space shuttle missions.
Body found in building near Kennedy Space Center launchpad
Bianca Prieto - Orlando Sentinel
The body of a custodian at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center was found this afternoon in building near a launch pad. The man's body was found inside the building near the liquid oxygen tank at Launch Pad 39A by a launch pad supervisor around 2:15 p.m., said spokeswoman Brittney Longly. It's unclear how long the body had been there or how the death occurred.
No comments:
Post a Comment