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The Swiss Space Center at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanna, or EPFL, announced Wednesday that it is planning to launch a satellite to remove debris from low-Earth orbit. The 11-million USD satellite, named CleanSpace One, is intended to actively intercept and deorbit defunct satellites that contribute to the growing cloud of LEO debris as they disintegrate and collide with one another. “It has become essential to be aware of the existence of [space] debris and the risks that are run by its proliferation,” said Claude Nicollier, astronaut and EPFL professor. Volker Gass, the director of the Swiss...

Oftentimes I'm perfectly happy being in the cheap seats when witnessing life's spectacular moments. (Well, not perfectly happy. I'm always searching for a better view.) Take the Northern Lights. In recent weeks, some people who normally might not be able to gaze at the Aurora Borealis from their own back yard got treated to quite the light show, thanks to a solar radiation storm late last month. But what would the Northern Lights look like from the real nosebleeds (though not cheap)? What would they look like from, say, the International Space Station? NASA has released video of a sequence...

This is a cool video of the ISS flying from Mexico to New Brunswick Canada. You can see the Aurora Borealis in the distance. As you get further north, it is easier to tell what is what, and you can clearly make out Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit (which surprisingly has a lot of lights, but the lights could be Windsor), Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, and even Fredrikton. You can see most of the great lakes, the St Lawrence River, and at the very end you can see the Gaspee peninsula of Quebec, and my favorite place I have worked,...

The night before the 1986 explosion, Boisjoly and four others argued that joints in the shuttle's boosters couldn't withstand a cold-weather launch.

As a former NASA executive, I am saddened by the media response to Newt Gingrich's proposal that we return to the moon. The mockery and ridicule does America a great disservice. Space exploration and development is an important national issue. It's not only possible and necessary to safeguard our future—it can be a lot cheaper than anybody dreams.

[BIG snip] Santorum's ad and his Op-Ed, meant to mock Gingrich, in reality can only distinctly not help Santorum's struggling campaign. Gingrich will surely make the inevitable -- and correct -- connection between Santorum's ad and a serious attack on the Reagan space legacy -- and the dreams of America itself. "We'll continue our quest in space…. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue," said President Reagan that tragic January night. Well, no they won't. Not if Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have anything to say about it. "I promise," says Santorum. Worse, whether Santorum's staff understands it...

An experiment going up outside of Chicago will attempt to measure the intimate connections among information, matter and spacetime. If it works, it could rewrite the rules for 21st-century physicsCraig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich wants to create a lunar colony that he says could become a U.S. state. There's his grand research plan to figure out what makes the human brain tick. And he's warned about electromagnetic pulse attacks leaving America without electricity. To some people, these ideas sound like science fiction. But mostly they are not. Several science policy experts say the former House speaker's ideas are based in mainstream science. But somehow, Gingrich manages to make them sound way out there, taking them first a small step and then a giant leap further than...

  Newt, Mitt, and Ron Speak Out on a Moon Base David C. Stolinsky Jan. 30, 2012 Newt Gingrich states that if he is elected, he will establish a permanent moon colony by 2020 and admit it as an American state.− News item Mitt Romney states that if a corporate executive proposed spending billions on a moon base in this economy, Romney would fire him.− News item Ron Paul states that the only people he would consider sending to the moon are politicians. − News item Gingrich, impulsive as usual, imagines a moon colony and wants to establish one...

Newt Gingrich’s moon base idea takes center stage at the GOP debate in Florida If aliens were watching from outer space, even they might have been shocked by the amount of time devoted to space travel in Thursday’s presidential debate. Newt Gingrich excited Florida’s struggling space coast this week when he pledged to industry executives that he would colonize the moon by the end of his second presidential term. The big promise drew flak from his GOP rivals, and a question at the debate from a Twitter user who wanted to know how the former speaker planned to pay for...

........."China is expected to complete its first exploration of the moon in 2010, and will establish a base on the moon as we did in the South Pole and the North Pole," said the program's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, according to the official People's Daily. 'For the Benefit of Humanity' Beijing Morning Post quoted him as elaborating that the base would be used to "mine [the moon's] riches for the benefit of humanity."

The United States will have a permanent manned colony on the moon by 2020 if Newt Gingrich is in charge, the Republican presidential hopeful announced today (Jan. 25). Gingrich laid out this goal during a speech in the city of Cocoa, on Florida's Space Coast. He also said that near-Earth space would be bustling with commercial activity by 2020, and that America would possess a next-generation propulsion system by then, allowing the nation to get astronauts to Mars quickly and efficiently. "By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it...

CASS COUNTY, TX (KLTV) - From Chopper 7, the shear magnitude of what's sitting in this field is clear. This patch of land is leased by TransCanada...and it is filled with 100 miles worth of pipes. "Well, it's a storage yard. And, it's fairly common and it's prior to construction for large pipeline projects to assemble pipe in one central location and distribute it from there," Jim Prescott, a project representative with Keystone said. And, that project is the Keystone Pipeline...which is now on hold until further notice due to President Obama's rejection of TransCanada's application. "So, in the meantime...

. Florida Republicans and Conservatives … Let’s defeat “Barack Hussein Obama” in November 2012 and reclaim America for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton (et al) ! Newt Gingrich's vision for "America's Space Renaissance" is "absolutely "incredible" ... Campaign Rally today on Florida's "Space and Treasure Coast" ... (Click here for C-Span speech) Newt Gingrich -- Vision for America in Space Again ============================================= Patton-at-Bastogne, (CEAI@Engineering-Excellence.US) Free Republic member since 1996 Florida Resident .

According to the Space Politics blog, Newt Gingrich plans to make a space policy speech on Florida's space coast probably Wednesday. He said it would be "in the John F. Kennedy tradition rather than the current bureaucracy." Gingrich has been a fierce critic of what he calls the NASA bureaucracy, according to Fox News, and an advocate for outside-the-box thinking like using prize competitions, according to Space Politics. It has been rare for candidates running for president to make speeches wholly devoted to space issues. Considering that Gingrich is now the front runner for the Republic nomination, this could be...

An immense blast of plasma spewed late Sunday night from the sun led to the strongest radiation storm bombarding our planet since 2005, and a rare warning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency -- and even a plan to redirect certain high-flying airplanes. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center -- the nation’s official source of warnings about space weather and its impact on Earth -- issued a watch for a geomagnetic storm expected to hit our planet Tuesday morning after a satellite witnessed an ultraviolet flash from the massive solar eruption, according to Spaceweather.com.

A powerful solar eruption is expected to blast a stream of charged particles toward Earth tomorrow (Jan. 24), as the strongest radiation storm since 2005 rages on the sun. Early this morning (0359 GMT Jan. 23, which corresponds to late Sunday, Jan. 22 at 10:59 p.m. EST), NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught an extreme ultraviolet flash from a huge eruption on the sun , according to the skywatching website Spaceweather.com. The solar flare spewed from sunspot 1402, a region of the sun that has become increasingly active lately. Several NASA satellites, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Solar Heliospheric Observatory...

<p>The Obama administration is launching a new space arms-control initiative that critics say will lead to restrictions on U.S. military activities in space, a key U.S. strategic war-fighting advantage.</p> <p>Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to announce the initiative as early as Tuesday. The plan will be built on work contained in a European Union draft code of conduct for space that the Pentagon and State Department have criticized as too restrictive.</p>

On Wednesday, Jan. 18, astronomers, physicists and scientists from related fields will convene in Tucson, Ariz. from across the world to discuss an endeavor that only a few years ago would have been regarded as nothing less than outrageous. The conference is organized by Dimitrios Psaltis, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, and Daniel Marrone, an assistant professor of astronomy at Steward Observatory. "Nobody has ever taken a picture of a black hole," Psaltis said. "We are going to do just that." "Even five years ago, such a proposal would not have seemed credible,"...

NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the oldest galaxy on record, the space administration announced Tuesday. The space administration said it has captured an image of a group of galaxies located 13.1 billion light years away. The team said the galaxies represent a cluster in the initial stages of development. “These galaxies formed during the earliest stages of galaxy assembly, when galaxies had just started to cluster together,” said Michele Trenti of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. “The result confirms our theoretical understanding...

AUSTIN—NASA's Kepler space telescope has found its tiniest extrasolar planets yet. The three rocky worlds are smaller than Earth; the smallest one is barely larger than Mars. Together, they constitute the most compact planetary system ever seen—less than 5 million kilometers across. Moreover, the parent star, known as KOI-961, is a puny red dwarf, just 70% larger than the giant planet Jupiter. Indeed, says astronomer John Johnson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the KOI-961 system is more akin to Jupiter and its moons than to a sunlike star with orbiting planets.

PARIS — A maritime-surveillance satellite launched Jan. 9 aboard a Chinese Long March 4B rocket is healthy in orbit and sending signals as it prepares for service with satellite-messaging company Orbcomm, OHB AG of Germany announced Jan. 10. Bremen-based OHB is the parent company of Luxembourg-based LuxSpace, which built the 28-kilogram VesselSat 2 satellite. An identical VesselSat 1 was launched in October as a secondary passenger aboard an Indian PSLV rocket. Both VesselSat satellites were built for Fort Lee, N.J.-based Orbcomm in partial compensation for six Orbcomm satellites that were built in Russia under OHB supervision and that failed in...

Despite various economic issues undermining efforts by the world’s leading space powers to forge a program for future manned flights to the Red Planet, an international working group has come up with a universal space exploration roadmap. The effort by the partner nations in the International Space Station project, namely Russia, the United States, Canada, Japan and the European Space Agency, was also supported by China, India, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other countries

PASADENA — Two JPL-managed spacecraft designed to study the gravitational fluctuations of the moon and provide insight into the evolution of our space neighbor were hurtling closer to the moon today, and were expected to settle into orbit for the new year. The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory spacecraft were launched Sept. 10 from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first craft, GRAIL-A was scheduled to begin orbiting the moon at 1:21 p.m. Saturday, while its twin, GRAIL-B, was expected to reach orbit at 2:05 p.m. Sunday. "Our team may not get to partake in a traditional New Year's celebration, but...

"For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets. They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized "cleanroom" where the equipment was stored. They spoke in code...."

It's A Christmas Wreath... 1,000 Light Years Away: Nasa Discovers Amazing Nebula (Complete With Red Bow and Silver Bells) [Pic in URL] By DAILY MAIL REPORTER 24th December 2011 Nasa scientists were in a very festive mood on Friday, releasing an amazing image of a nebula they nicknamed the 'wreath nebula.' The scene looks like a ring of evergreens decorated with a red Christmasy bow with silver bells throughout. It was captured by Nasa's WISE space telescope. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is getting into a festive mood this Christmas after imaging a beautiful nebula called Barnard 3, or...

I thought I share this with you... Merry Christmas!!!!

A mysterious metal ball reportedly fell from space , landing in a grasslands area of the African nation of Namibia. So far experts claim the object is not of alien origin. It has two bumps on each end, appears to be hollow and weights about 13 pounds. Namibia's National Forensic Science Institute Director Paul Ludik said the sphere is 3.6 feet around and is made out of a "sophisticated" alloy that is not unknown to modern science, although it has no identifying markings to link it with a country or a company. So far that's about all we're told. But...

MOFFET FIELD, California - NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-sized planets orbiting a sun outside our Solar System. NASA says the planets - Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f - are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone. That's where where liquid water could exist on their surfaces.

A newfound comet defied long odds on Thursday (Dec. 15), surviving a suicidal dive through the sun's hellishly hot atmosphere, according to NASA scientists. Comet Lovejoy plunged through the sun's corona at about 7 p.m. EST (midnight GMT on Dec. 16), coming within 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) of our star's surface. Temperatures in the corona can reach 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius), so most researchers expected the icy wanderer to be completely destroyed.

The tycoons of cyberspace are looking to bankroll America's resurgence in outer space, reviving "Star Trek" dreams that first interested them in science. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen made the latest step Tuesday, unveiling plans for a new commercial spaceship that, instead of blasting off a launch pad, would be carried high into the atmosphere by the widest plane ever built before it fires its rockets. He joins Silicon Valley powerhouses Elon Musk of PayPal and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. in a new private space race that attempts to fill the gap left when the U.S. government ended the space...

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan are building the world’s biggest plane to help launch cargo and astronauts into space, in the latest of several ventures fueled by technology tycoons clamoring to write America’s next chapter in spaceflight. Their plans, unveiled Tuesday, call for a twin-fuselage aircraft with wings longer than a football field to carry a rocket high into the atmosphere and drop it, avoiding the need for a launch pad and the expense of additional rocket fuel. Allen, who teamed up with Rutan in 2004 to send the first privately financed, manned spacecraft into space,...

WASHINGTON -- NASA has announced the launch target for Space Exploration Technologies' (SpaceX) second Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration flight will be Feb. 7, 2012, pending completion of final safety reviews, testing and verification. NASA also has agreed to allow SpaceX to send its Dragon spacecraft to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) in a single flight. "SpaceX has made incredible progress over the last several months preparing Dragon for its mission to the space station," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "We look forward to a successful mission, which...

New planet discovery excites scientists: the discovery of a new planet 600 light years away with roughly the right temperature for plant and animal habitation is causing a buzz in the science community. Though much larger than Earth, scientists haven't ruled out the possibility of life being discovered. A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside Earth's solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, except for one hitch. It is a bit too big. The planet is smack in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced today (Dec. 5). The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation.These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700. The potentially habitable alien world, a first for...

This is the Ugandan aircraft that Africa hopes will thrust it right into the space race. Constructed amidst the rubble of his mother's backyard, ambitious Chris NSamba believes the African Skyhawk will lead to his continent launching its first astronaut into orbit. The African Space Research Programme founder has been helped by 600 volunteers in partially achieving the first stage of his dream - the creation of the plane that will penetrate the edge of space by flying at 80,000ft.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. –  The secretive X-37B robotic space plane is about to set its own space-endurance record on a hush-hush project operated by the U.S. Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office. The craft, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle-2, was boosted into Earth orbit atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 5. Tomorrow (Nov. 30), the X-37B spacecraft will mark its 270th day of flight — a lifetime in space that was heralded in the past as the vehicle's upper limit for spaceflight by project officials. "It's still up there," U.S. Air...

A self-styled "jet man" has performed another death defying stunt - flying alongside two Albatross aircraft above the Swiss Alps. Adventurer Yves Rossy flew in a custom-built jet suit over the mountain range in formation with the aircraft. Rossy, 51, launched himself from the side of a helicopter before taking his place alongside the two jets high above the Alps. The daredevil - who used to fly fighter jets with the Swiss airforce - wears a custom built jet suit which has a wing span of two metres. The pack weighs around 120lb and is fitting with four engines that...

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory will begin its mission to the Red Planet Saturday, with a launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station is scheduled to occur during a one-hour and 43 minute window opening at 15:02 UTC (10:02 local time). [...]

HAMPTON Start with the big numbers - 354 million miles to Mars and a spacecraft weighing 7,000 pounds and traveling at 13,000 mph. Then go to the small numbers - an eight-month journey ending with seven minutes in nail-biting final descent. Put them together and you've got something that NASA Langley's David Way has worked toward for 10 years: the landing on Mars of NASA's newest planetary rover, Curiosity, scheduled to launch Saturday. More than 100 researchers and technicians at NASA Langley Research Center have worked on the mission. "When I started this project, my wife and I had a...

After exhaustive work to recover from a dramatic August launch failure, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut was poised for blastoff late Sunday on a delayed flight to the International Space Station, the program's first manned launching since the U.S. shuttle was retired.

Russian engineers are scrambling to salvage a robotic Mars moon probe that is stuck in orbit around Earth, but are facing an uphill battle to get the spacecraft back on a path to the Red Planet before it becomes just another piece of space junk. The Russian Phobos-Grunt spacecraft launched Tuesday (Nov. 8) and separated from its Zenit rocket as planned. But the probe's own thrusters failed to fire in a maneuver that would have sent Phobos-Grunt on a trajectory toward Mars, Russian space officials said. Now the spacecraft, which is also carrying China's first Mars orbiter, is trapped in...

NASA's Deep Space Network personnel sent commands to the Voyager 2 spacecraft Nov. 4 to switch to the backup set of thrusters that controls the roll of the spacecraft. Confirmation was received today that the spacecraft accepted the commands. The change will allow the 34-year-old spacecraft to reduce the amount of power it requires to operate and use previously unused thrusters as it continues its journey toward interstellar space, beyond our solar system. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are each equipped with six sets, or pairs, of thrusters to control their movement. These include three pairs of...

Mission to Martian moon is the country's first interplanetary attempt since 1996. Eric Hand 04 November 2011 Main Phobos, as seen in 2008 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Article tools Print Email Rights and Permissions Share/bookmark For the first time in 15 years, Russia is getting back into the business of interplanetary space science. It plans to launch an ambitious mission on 8 November to return a sample of soil from the Martian moon Phobos. The Phobos–Grunt mission (which means Phobos-soil) would welcome Russia back to the elite group of nations — the United States, Japan and...

To send spacecraft to other stars in the space of a human lifetime, new methods of propulsion are going to be needed to provide the necessary ‘oomph’ to break free of our Solar System. Currently the best bet is nuclear fusion power, but there’s a problem – it hasn’t even been shown to be a commercially viable source of energy on Earth yet. ‘Splitting the atom’ in the 1930s paved the way for modern day nuclear fission reactors, but nuclear fusion is a different and altogether far cleaner process.

Get Ready! Listen up – Because your space playbook is about to really change. There’s a new gunslinger in Dodge and he’s huge. He’s hungry. He’s very wealthy. He’s ambitious, (like we used to be). And he is not American. He has already started to play the Game and we are unaware. We don’t even know what the Game is. What is the Game? The Game is what I call "Solar System Monopoly". This will characterize the 21st and 22nd centuries and beyond. "The Hell you say." Yes, I say -- and if we ignore this it shall be at...

Tractor beams -- the ability to trap and move objects using laser light – have generally been the purview of Star Trek and other science fiction shows but NASA has real-life space plans for the far-out technology. NASA this week said it had awarded $100,000 to researchers at its Goddard Space Flight Center to study tractor beam technology that could remotely capture planetary or atmospheric particles and deliver them to a robotic rover or orbiting spacecraft for analysis. More on NASA: NASA's 7 wicked cool crop-circle corn mazes NASA said its researchers will be looking at three experimental methods for...

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain as part major new scientific project that aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our universe. Due to follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider, the latest "big science" experiment being proposed by physicists will see the world's most powerful laser being constructed. Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin, scientists...

Word has leaked out that in its new budget, the Obama administration intends to terminate NASA’s planetary exploration program. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, being readied on the pad, will be launched, as will the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter scheduled for 2013, but that will be it. No further missions to anywhere are planned. After 2013, America’s amazing career of planetary exploration, which ran from the Mariner probes in the 1960s through the great Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, Pathfinder, MarsGlobalSurveyor, MarsOdyssey, Spirit, Opportunity, MarsReconnaissanceOrbiter, Galileo and Cassini missions, will simply end. Furthermore, the plan from the Office of Management and...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment," which may have brought water and other life-forming ingredients to Earth. During this epoch, comets and other frosty objects that were flung from the outer solar system pummeled the inner planets. The barrage scarred our moon and produced large amounts of dust. Now Spitzer has spotted a band of dust around a nearby bright star in the northern sky called Eta Corvi that...