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The NASA manager overseeing development of Boeing and SpaceX’s commercial crew ferry ships says the space agency has approved SpaceX’s proposal to strap in astronauts atop Falcon 9 rockets, then fuel the launchers in the final hour of the countdown as the company does for its uncrewed missions. The “load-and-go” procedure has become standard for SpaceX’s satellite launches, in which an automatic countdown sequencer commands chilled kerosene and cryogenic liquid oxygen to flow into the Falcon 9 rocket in the final minutes before liftoff. “From a program standpoint, we went throgh a pretty extensive process where we laid out the...

Vice President Mike Pence is expected to give a speech at the Pentagon Thursday where he will outline the next steps in forming the Space Force as the fifth branch of the military. “JUST IN: VP Pence will deliver a speech Thursday at the Pentagon about next steps in the formation of the Space Force,” a CNN correspondent reported Tuesday. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Tuesday that the Defense Department, Pence, and the White House are in “complete agreement” in the creation of a new Space Force.

SOLAR MINIMUM DEEPENS: The sun has been without sunspots for 32 of the past 33 days. To find a similar stretch of blank suns, you have to go back to 2009 when the sun was experiencing the deepest solar minimum in a century. Solar minimum has returned, bringing extra cosmic rays, long-lasting holes in the sun's atmosphere, and strangely pink auroras. ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION UPDATE: As the sunspot cycle declines, we expect cosmic rays to increase. Is this actually happening? The answer is "yes." Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus have been monitoring cosmic radiation in the atmosphere...

NASA shared photos of the capsule's transfer to the White House lawn in a tweet July 21. The display was part of the Made in America showcase, an annual product display launched by President Donald Trump to highlight American manufacturing. The capsule earned its place thanks to its production by Lockheed Martin in 2011 and 2012 using parts manufactured by more than a thousand companies based in the U.S., NASA officials wrote. This specific Orion capsule is the only one to have flown so far, during a test flight on Dec. 5, 2014, according another NASA tweet about the display....

SA11AI IND Griffin, Kenneth C. Ill. May 25 $38,900.00 Citadel, LLC # SA11AI IND Musk, Elon Calif. June 5 $33,900.00 SpaceX # SA11AI IND Bass, Edward Tex. June 26 $33,500.00 Kelly Hart & Hallman

WASHINGTON — If and when a new military branch for space gets off the ground, its ranks would be dominated by airmen. But Army soldiers also would have a role by virtue of much they rely on military satellites in peacetime or in war. More than 70 percent of the Army's major weapons and equipment need satellites to function. About 2,220 active-duty soldiers, reservists and civilians make up the "space forces" under the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command headquartered at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. "We are the biggest users of space," said Brig. Gen. Tim Lawson,...

The announcement that President Donald Trump wanted to create a “Space Force” that would serve as a co-equal branch of the Armed Forces brought a wide range of reactions. Some experts believed we needed it to defend U.S. interests above the clouds, including protecting our satellites and preventing orbital bombardment by China or Russia. Others posited it as a dangerous step toward the irrevocable militarization of space. And some said it didn’t matter, either because the unilateral expansion of the armed forces is beyond the scope of presidential power, or because Trump says he’s going to do a lot of...

A round, basketball-shaped autonomous assistant that is supposed to help astronauts with their space work. Sounds a lot like HAL-9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey," right? CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) won't say, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that," but the first-ever flying, autonomous, artificial intelligence-based robot is slated to head to the International Space Station (ISS) later this week. With any luck, CIMON will stay there for the foreseeable future. ..." "What we're trying to do with Watson AI services is imitate a human," Biniok said, adding that CIMON has a digital "mouth" and can express...

Japan's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft will collect a piece of the asteroid Ryugu and bring it back to Earth. The asteroid Ryugu, recently imaged by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft that will now prepare to collect a sample. JAXA _____________________________________________________________________________________ Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has been traveling through space for almost four years, and it has finally reached its destination. The spacecraft has traveled all this way to a small asteroid, named Ryugu, for a singular purpose: to collect a piece of it and bring it back to Earth. Hayabusa-2 is the successor to Japan’s original Hayabusa spacecraft, which visited the asteroid Itokawa in 2005....

Russia has pledged severe repercussions if President Donald Trump’s order to set up a new, space-oriented military branch violates a treaty banning nuclear weapons in the cosmos. Trump said this week he will establish a sixth branch of the military named the “Space Force,” pending budgetary approval from the U.S. Congress. The idea could require the U.S. to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which prohibits the deployment of weapons of mass destruction but not conventional arms in space. Viktor Bondarev, head of the Committee on Defense and Security of Russia's upper parliamentary house, told the state-run RIA...

The term “moonshot” is sometimes invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the first human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to travel to the nearest stars. The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a press conference joined by renowned physicists including Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the current vision is that thousands...

Credit: CC0 Public Domain _____________________________________________________________________________ Dan Hooper, a senior scientist with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has written a paper outlining a way future aliens could keep their civilizations alive in spite of the isolation due to an expanding universe. In his paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, he suggests they might consider collecting and storing stars. A Dyson sphere is a theoretical structure able to house a star. Originally proposed by Freeman Dyson, the sphere was originally envisioned as a group of satellites completely encompassing a star to capture all of its energy. That energy could then be...

President Donald Trump announced Monday that he has ordered the creation of a new military branch, adding the "Space Force" to the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard. "It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space. Very importantly I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces, that is a big statement," Trump said at a meeting of the National Space Council on Monday. "We are going to...

<p>WASHINGTON — Trump announces he’s directing Pentagon to create ‘space force’ as independent service branch.</p> <p>Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</p>

The world’s first trillionaire won’t come from cryptocurrency or some clever new app – he or she will become rich from asteroid mining. _____________________________________________________________________ That’s what bankers Goldman Sachs reckon, anyway – and several companies are now vying to be the first into space. NASA estimates that the total value of asteroids out there could be up to $700 quintillion – equivalent to £75 billion each for us here on Earth. Several companies are now buidling the machines which will take us there – including Deep Space Industries, which is building a steam-powered thruster for spacecraft, the Guardian reports. British...

"A second section deals with commercial remote sensing regulatory reform. “The current regulatory system is woefully out of date and needs significant reform to ensure the United States remains the chosen jurisdiction for these high tech companies,” the fact sheet states. A related section calls on the Secretary of Commerce to provide a plan to create a “one-stop shop” within his department “for administering and regulating commercial space flight activities.” The Commerce Department had previously announced plans to combine the Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs office with the Office of Space Commerce..." http://spacenews.com/new-policy-directive-implements-commercial-space-regulatory-reforms/ This appears to address regulatory issues that...

An Orbital ATK Antares rocket will launch a commercial Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station from Virginia's Eastern Shore before dawn on Monday, and the launch could be visible to potentially millions of spectators along the U.S. East Coast. The Antares rocket is scheduled to launch at 4:39 a.m. EDT (0839 GMT) on Monday (May 21) and should be highly visible across the East Coast of the United States, weather permitting. The mission, called OA-9, will launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to deliver more than 3 tons of supplies to...

On Monday, a cargo delivery to the International Space Station will carry old-fashioned sextants, E. colibacteria and lasers that will create a temperature 10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space. … CAL is sending the space station an experimental physics package that holds an "ice chest"-like compartment filled with lasers and electronics; the interior will be able to reach a temperature10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space, according to a NASA statement. Within this instrument, the researchers will use laser cooling techniques and magnets to slow down atoms until they are almost entirely motionless. By studying...

A bright, supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA ______________________________________________________________________________ Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years. "This black hole is growing so rapidly that it's shining thousands of times more brightly than an...

It’s a staple of science fiction.... the idea of sending out spaceships with colonists and transplanting the seed of humanity among the stars. Between discovering new worlds, becoming an interstellar species, and maybe even finding extra-terrestrial civilizations, the dream of spreading beyond the Solar System is one that can’t become reality soon enough! For decades, scientists have contemplated how humanity might one-day reach achieve this lofty goal. And the range of concepts they have come up with present a whole lot of pros and cons. These pros and cons were raised in a recent study by Martin Braddock, a member...