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It's more than 50 years since Russia signalled the start of the space race with the launch of Sputnik One. For more than two decades from 1957 the Soviet Union and the USA competed in a battle to be the first to the stars. The race ended in 1969 when the US delivered the coup de grace by landing Neil Armstrong safely on the Moon. Now space flights are commonplace and Sir Richard Branson will soon be taking the first tourists on sub-orbital flights on his craft SpaceShipTwo. In 1964 the first TV satellite was launched into a geostationary orbit...

WASHINGTON - President Bush decided to fire a military missile to bring down a broken spy satellite because of the potential danger to people from rocket fuel it is carrying, officials said Thursday. Deputy National Security Adviser James Jeffries, briefing reporters at the Pentagon, did not say when the attempted intercept would be conducted, but the satellite is expected to hit Earth during the first week of March. Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at the same briefing that the "window of opportunity" for such a shootdown, presumably to be launched from a Navy...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A large U.S. spy satellite has lost power and propulsion and could hit the Earth in late February or March, government officials said Saturday. The satellite, which no longer be controlled, could contain hazardous materials, and it is unknown where on the planet it might come down, they said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is classified as secret.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - A spacewalking astronaut tossed two large chunks of junk off the international space station Monday, hurling the old equipment into orbit. Clayton Anderson, a sportsman who enjoys officiating basketball games back on Earth, heaved a 1,400-pound, refrigerator-size ammonia tank away from the station. His first toss was a 200-pound camera mounting. Mission Control declared the tank throw great and "right down the middle." "Well, in that case, give Brad Lidge and Roy Oswalt a call and tell them I just hummed a 17,500-mph fastball," Anderson said, referring to the star pitchers for his hometown Houston Astros....

Pieces of space junk from a Russian satellite coming out of orbit narrowly missed hitting a jetliner over the Pacific Ocean overnight. The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm last night. According to a plane spotter, who was tuning into a high frequency radio broadcast at the time, the pilot "reported that the rumbling noise from the space debris...

Sorry for the shameless vanity, but I was just outside in the back yard in Northern Georgia, and an incredibly bright light illuminated the dark yard like an arc lamp. I looked up and saw a meteor streaking overhead, white hot, which then broke up into orange, glowing fragments. This happened at 10:21PM EST. I apologize for posting something random like this, but it was astonishing. Perhaps it was a piece of space junk that reentered the atmosphere tonight. Did anyone else see this? It was truly spectacular.

For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens. In the past decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass - or, in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable - they grew more anxious. Early this year, after a half- century of growth, the...

"Wierd fiery lights in the sky were reported in North and South Carolina." Video report at link: http://cbs2.com/video/?cid=71

Watch Spectacular Video from the Sky NORAD: 'Meteor' really a rocket Last Edited: Thursday, 04 Jan 2007, 11:14 AM MST Created: Thursday, 04 Jan 2007, 7:20 AM MST SkyFOX captured video of space debris breaking up in the atmosphere LIVE during Good Day Colorado around 6:15 a.m. Thursday, January 4, 2007. DENVER  --  SkyFox captured incredible video of a Russian rocket body bursting into flames as it crashed to earth over North America. NORAD has confirmed that the light show was caused by the re-entry of a spent russian science rocket or "space junk" in layman's terms. SkyFOX pilot...

The Russian Space Agency has no objections to Madonna's plans for a space flight, but the American pop diva could make a space trip no earlier than 2009, the agency's spokesperson said Wednesday. Alexei Mitrofanov, a flamboyant lawmaker from the ultra-nationalist LDPR party, earlier proposed that Madonna's desire to make the trip, which she expressed during her two-day visit to Russia, be fulfilled - a proposal that met with rejection by Russian lawmakers. "We are aware of today's debates in the State Duma [the lower house of the Russian parliament] as to the proposed flight by Madonna to the International...

In an unusual act of generosity, the Soviet space program has been showering valuable metal scraps on the villages surrounding the Plesetsk Cosmodrome for more than forty years.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - For the second time in just under a year, a circuit breaker failed on the international space station Wednesday, shutting down one of the gyroscopes needed to keep the orbiting outpost steady and pointed in the right position. The circuit breaker was a new one put in by spacewalking astronauts last summer. In a repeat from one year ago, the latest failure left the space station with only two functioning gyroscopes, the bare minimum needed for control, NASA (news - web sites) said. This time, though, the problem could affect NASA's plans to launch Discovery to...

Feb 7, 3:46 AM EST NASA Taking Steps to Avoid Space Junk By PETE YOST WASHINGTON (AP) -- NASA for years underestimated the amount of damage that small space debris could inflict on Earth-orbiting space shuttles, documents show. While the agency explores whether damage from such impacts could have caused the Columbia disaster, its own documents detail replacements of nicked windshields and dents. A report from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in May disclosed that the computer modeling the space agency was using to assess the dangers "was underpredicting" the number of hits and urged a revision to the...

Tim Radford, science editor Saturday, May 18, 2002 Nasa officials admitted yesterday that they have been forced to move the International Space Station (ISS) to protect it and its crew of three from a piece of flying junk. As they did so, a British scientist was warning the world that - in addition to the natural menace of meteorites - 2,000 tonnes of refuse was now circling the planet at 18,000mph. The ISS weighs 150 tonnes and is bigger than a three bedroom house. Its designers gave it a thicker skin as protection from collisions. Since astronauts began using it...