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Trump was effusive about updates to the budget supporting the Special Olympics, and a return to space “in a BIG WAY.”“Today, I officially updated my budget to include $18 million for our GREAT @SpecialOlympics,” Trump tweeted, “whose athletes inspire us and make our Nation so PROUD!”“Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars,” the President also said. “I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”And despite an original proposal that cut the Great Lakes Restoration...

After a revised budget proposal from the Whitehouse added another $1.6billion mostly to pay to stop more SLS delays NASA announced that their plan to return to the Moon in 5 years would be named 'Artemis'. Which is of course the best name for any lunar program, so good in fact that NASA aren't the first people to use the name of this goddess for a space program. So let's have a quick tour of other projects with the same name. Realistically, the budget may not happen, for obvious political reasons, but I hope the name stays.

The reusable robotic vehicle, which looks like a miniature version of NASA's space shuttle orbiters, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 7, 2017. It's unclear what exactly the spacecraft is doing up there. X-37B missions are classified, and Air Force officials tend to speak of project goals in general terms, as this excerpt from the X-37B fact sheet shows: "The primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold: reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth." Still, the Air...

An 'alien plughole' on Mars that has baffled scientists could have a simple explanation. Astronomers claim the strange crater, which has a terraced rather than bowl pattern, has been created by water ice. To confirm their theory, researchers found an enormous slab of water ice just beneath the crater, measuring 130ft (40 metre) thick. 'Craters should be bowl shaped, but this one had terraces in the wall,' says Ali Bramson, a graduate student in the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Terraces can form when there are layers of different materials in the planet's subsurface, such as dirt, ice...

Two Stories that I will post links to given the amount of Websites that have Shunned FR. Futher comments in the Body section, here are the links:https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/02/us-legislation-aims-to-thwart-chinas-electric-vehicle-dominance.htmlhttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lithium-electric-exclusive/exclusive-us-seeks-to-challenge-chinas-electric-vehicle-supply-chain-dominance-idUSKCN1S81EO

Such a shield could leave Mars in the relatively protected magnetotail of the magnetic field created by the object, allowing the Red Planet to slowly restore its atmosphere. About 90 percent of Mars's atmosphere was stripped away by solar particles in the lifetime of the planet, which was likely temperate and had surface water about 3.5 billion years ago. According to simulation models, such a shield could help Mars achieve half the atmospheric pressure of Earth in a matter of years. With protection from solar winds, frozen CO2 at Mars's polar ice caps would start to sublimate, or turn directly...

Before the explosion, the test was proceeding according to plan, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of Mission Assurance, said at a press conference about SpaceX’s upcoming resupply mission to the ISS. The capsule was tethered in place for the test, which was designed to make sure that the system’s thrusters were working properly. Koenigsmann said that the capsule powered up “as expected” and then sets of smaller thrusters on either side of the vehicle called Dracos fired for five seconds each. Those tests “went very well” said Koenigsmann. Then it was time to test the SuperDracos, the thrusters designed to...

Live coverage of Blue Origin launch at ~9:20 am PST today: In 9 min from the time of this threat post.

Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle will launch on its 11th test flight this morning (May 2), and you can watch the spaceflight action live. The reusable rocket-capsule combo is scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas testing ground at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local Texas time). The uncrewed flight will carry 38 microgravity research payloads to suborbital space and back, company representatives announced via Twitter Wednesday You can watch live here at Space.com, courtesy of Blue Origin, or directly via the company's website. New Shepard is designed to carry paying customers, offering them great...

Critics of California’s plan to link the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas by high-speed rail have cited the estimated cost of the project – and now that cost is projected to increase by about $2 billion, according to a report. The state’s High-Speed Rail Authority now estimates that the plan will cost about $79 billion – with the price of the Central Valley segment already under construction rising from $10.6 billion to $12.4 billion, Bloomberg reported. The revised cost estimates were attributed to changes in the scope of the project and planning for contingencies, the report said.

(...) More than a week after the explosion, SpaceX remains silent about the incident. At this moment, even an “anomaly” in its test capsule should rattle the engineers, astronauts, and administrators invested in Dragon’s success. SpaceX was well on its way to launching American astronauts into space, a historic first in U.S. spaceflight history. (...) Barely two months ago, the same capsule was docked to the International Space Station, circling Earth. It arrived without people—this was only its first flight, after all—but plenty of fresh supplies, and the astronauts on the station opened the hatches and floated in. Several days...

Full title: Steve Forbes: Rich people don't need your money to buy electric cars -- Let's get real about EV tax creditsAmericans who want to drive electric vehicles should absolutely be free to do so. But the rest of us should not be forced to subsidize their expensive, environmentally questionable choice of cars. Liberal environmentalists have long touted electric vehicles (EVs) as an affordable, low-emission option for middle-class American families, even though the electricity used to power them is most often generated by fossil fuels and the buyers are rarely middle class. The soon-to-expire tax breaks that EV owners receive...

Along with the investment, Ford confirmed that it will use Rivian’s electric platform to develop a Ford-branded all-electric vehicle. Last year, we took a close look at Rivian’s electric platform, which the startup claims enable a range of up to 400 miles. Rivian was already using Ford F-150 pickups as test mules to test its powertrain for its own R1T pickup, but the two companies confirmed that the vehicle they are partnering on is not an electric F-150.

Scientists just felt the Red Planet move under their feet — robotically from millions of miles away, on the stark surface of Mars. On April 6, NASA's InSight lander sensed its first confirmed marsquake, a phenomenon scientists suspected, but couldn't confirm, occurred on the neighboring planet. Measuring the Martian equivalent of earthquakes, seismic waves traveling through the interior of the planet, was among the lander's key science goals. "We've been waiting months for our first marsquake," Philippe Lognonné, the principal investigator for the seismometer instrument, said in a statement released by the French space agency, which runs the instrument with...

Mars formed in record time, growing to its present size in a mere three million years, much quicker than scientists previously thought.Its rapid formation could explain why the Red Planet is about one tenth the mass of Earth. The study supports a 20-year-old theory that Mars remained small because it avoided collisions with planetary building material. The new finding is published in the journal Nature. In our early Solar System, well before planets had formed, a frisbee-shaped cloud of gas and dust encircled the Sun. Scientists believe that the planets grew from material pulled together by electrostatic charges - the...

NASA's next Mars mission is slowly coming together in a "clean room" in California. Technicians at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory assembled the capsule that will keep the Mars 2020 rover secure for its wild ride to the Red Planet's surface. After leaving Earth next summer, Mars 2020 will spend about seven months flying towards the Red Planet before a spectacular entry at its destination, including a repeat of the famous "7 minutes of terror" sequence that brought NASA's Curiosity rover to the planet's surface in 2012. (The Mars 2020 rover and Curiosity have similar body frames, although they carry...

MELBOURNE, Fla. – A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule suffered an anomaly Saturday afternoon during a routine engine test firing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station , company and 45th Space Wing officials confirmed. "On April 20, 2019, an anomaly occurred at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station during the Dragon 2 static test fire," wing spokesman Jim Williams told Florida Today. "The anomaly was contained and there were no injuries." Florida Today photographer Craig Bailey, who was covering an event in nearby Cocoa Beach, captured an image of orange plumes rising from SpaceX facilities at the cape at around 3:30 p.m.

Astronaut Christina Koch will spend nearly a year aboard the International Space Station, NASA announced on Wednesday, with her return trip delayed to February 2020. During her 11 months in space, she will monitor how her body responds to the mission, producing much-needed data about how well human bodies can withstand the dangers and hardships of long-term spaceflight. So far, that data has been difficult to come by. Standard space station missions last about six and a half months, and only a handful of NASA astronauts have stayed in orbit longer than 200 days in a single spaceflight. That's problematic...

On April 17, 1970, Apollo 13 returned to Earth after narrowly avoiding a deadly disaster in space. This was supposed to be the third mission to land on the moon. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise launched on April 11 and were two days into their trip to the moon when an oxygen tank exploded, and NASA had to abort the mission. When the astronauts called mission control to report the incident, Swigert uttered the famous quote, "Houston, we've had a problem."

A NASA technology demonstration may still be viable on the lunar surface.A NASA piggyback experiment may have survived the April 11 crash of Israel's Beresheet moon lander, experts said... The NASA payload, known as the Lunar Retroreflector Array (LRA), is a technology demonstration composed of eight mirrors made of quartz cube corners that are set into a dome-shaped aluminum frame. These mirrors are intended to serve as markers for other spacecraft, which can use them to orient themselves for precision landings.