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From spaceweather.com for Monday, May 19, 2008: The 2008 "ISS Marathon" gets underway this week when the International Space Station spends three days (May 21-23) in almost-constant sunlight. Sky watchers in Europe and North America can see the bright spaceship gliding overhead two to four times each night. Please try our new and improved Simple Satellite Tracker to find out when to look. The station is not only bright and easy to see with the naked eye, but also it makes a fine target for backyard telescopes: "I took these pictures during the early morning hours of May 12th using...

If you have ever wondered what they have built at the space station...have a look .... This is a great animation showing all the segments of the Space Station, the modules and the international partners that have helped create it. This is what we've been hauling in Shuttle flights for the past several years! This is far more complex and larger than most people know about...

The space shuttle Endeavour and the international space station will be visible to Antelope Valley residents early each morning for more than a week beginning Sunday. The Endeavour mission, to deliver the first component of a Japanese science laboratory and a Canadian robotic system to the station, is scheduled to end with a landing at 5:33 p.m. Wednesday, March 26, in Florida. The shuttle-space station combination will look like a very bright star moving steadily as they arc through the sky. If no variations are made to the flight plan, the only evening sighting of the shuttle and space station...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Space shuttle Endeavour pulled up to the international space station and docked Wednesday, kicking off almost two weeks of demanding construction work. Before the late-night linkup, Endeavour's commander, Dominic Gorie, guided the shuttle through a 360-degree backflip to allow for full photographic surveillance. It's one of the many safety-related procedures put in place following the Columbia tragedy in 2003. The space station crew used cameras with high-powered zoom lenses to photograph Endeavour from nose to tail, especially all the thermal tiles on its belly. The pictures — as many as 300 — will be scrutinized by...

Space freighter primed for launch By Jonathan Amos Science reporter, BBC News The development of Europe's ATV has taken 11 years Mission Guide: Jules Verne Europe is set to launch the biggest, most sophisticated spacecraft in its history. The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is an unmanned ship that can carry up to 7.6 tonnes of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Its other primary role is to push the orbiting outpost higher into the sky to keep it from falling back to Earth. The ATV will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Astronauts added a new room to the international space station on Friday in the way of Harmony. That's the name of the school bus-size compartment that was attached by a team of spacewalkers working outside and robot arm operators working inside. "I don't know that anybody's ever told our crew that we bring harmony with us, but we sure bring fun," Discovery's commander, Pamela Melroy, said as the spacewalk ended and the congratulations began. The Italian-built Harmony — 24 feet long and 31,000 pounds — was unloaded from the shuttle's payload bay and hoisted into place...

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan - A crew that includes Malaysia's first astronaut and an American who will become the first woman to command the international space station prepared Monday for blastoff later this week. The Soyuz-FG rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Central Asian steppe on Wednesday night to take Malaysia's Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, and Russian Yuri Malenchenko into orbit. During his 12-day space trip, Shukor is to study of the effects of microgravity and space radiation on cells and microbes, as well as experiments with proteins for a potential HIV vaccine. The rocket —...

CONTRACT RELEASE: C07-028 NASA Awards Contract for Space Station Hardware HOUSTON - NASA has signed a $46 million fixed price basic contract with S. P. Korolev Rocket and Space Public Corporation, also known as RSC Energia, in Korolev, Russia, for various hardware items and their integration into the International Space Station. The basic contract includes $19 million to purchase a Russian-designed toilet system with a privacy enclosure and additional space station equipment. The additional equipment includes a spare depress air pump used to conserve air when the crew exits the Quest airlock for a spacewalk; technical and engineering support for...

Hoping for the best, space station commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov hot wired two computers aboard the international space station today that engineers had feared were victims of fatal power supply failures. To everyone's delight, the machines promptly booted up and appeared to be running normally, two more successes in an improbable recovery from crippling computer crashes last week. Two of the three computers making up the Russian segment's guidance, navigation and control computers, along with two of three central control computers, were successfully revived Friday when Yurchikhin and Kotov used jumper cables to bypass suspect surge...

HOUSTON - A new set of solar panels gleamed in the sunlight Tuesday on the international space station as the freshly installed array started opening up. The first pair of solar wings was fully deployed by early afternoon. The other solar panel would be unfurled later in the day. It's a slow process. Each wing is unfolded halfway, then allowed to warm in the sun for about 30 minutes to prevented the solar panels from sticking together. The installation of the new array — part of the station's third pair of solar panels — started on Monday, when two astronauts...

08:27 Bill Gates considering space tourist trek to ISS MORE...

KOROLYOV, Russia - A Russian-built Soyuz capsule docked at the international space station late Monday, two days after blasting off from the Baikonur cosmodrome with U.S. billionaire Charles Simonyi and two Russian cosmonauts aboard. Once the capsule is secured to the station, it will take roughly two hours before the Soyuz crew are able to open the air locks and greet face-to-face the station's current crew — Russian Mikhail Tyurin and American astronauts Miguel Lopez-Alegria and Sunita Williams. Simonyi shelled out $20-25 million to be the world's fifth paying private space traveler. The arrival of a new crew is always...

Feb 4, 2007 — CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Two astronauts left the International Space Station on Sunday to finish hooking up a new cooling system that will pave the way for installation of European and Japanese modules beginning this year. Station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and flight engineer Sunita Williams left the station's Quest airlock at 8:38 a.m. EST (1338 GMT) for the planned 6-1/2 hour spacewalk. It was the second of three planned spacewalks over nine days, the most ambitious station assembly work ever attempted without a U.S. space shuttle crew present. Lopez-Alegria and Williams, both U.S. astronauts, will...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Fresh from the success of an impromptu spacewalk, shuttle Discovery's astronauts awoke Tuesday to the strains of "Zamboni" by the Gear Daddies and got ready to undock from the international space station. "We can't offer you a Zamboni to drive today," said Mission Control astronaut Shannon Lucid, referring to the ice rink machine immortalized in the Minnesota band's country rock song. "But if you look at today's flight plan, you will see that we are offering you the opportunity to fly the shuttle for half a lap flyaround. That's not a bad tradeoff." Space shuttle Discovery's...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA began retracting via remote control a 115-foot solar panel on the international space station Wednesday, likening the tricky task to folding a road map back up and stuffing it in the glove compartment. The electricity-generating solar array served as a temporary power source aboard the orbiting outpost. NASA needed to move it out of the way so that a new, permanent pair of solar wings could rotate in the direction of the sun. The folding-up began shortly before 1:30 p.m. EST and was expected to take about five hours. A crease developed when the array...

A violent solar explosion sent a dangerous wave of radiation through space late Tuesday, prompting NASA to order the crews of Discovery and the International Space Station to take shelter overnight, according to Local 6 News partner Florida Today. The solar flare erupted around 9:40 p.m., unleashing enough radiation to disrupt radio communications on Earth and in orbit while endangering astronauts circling 220 miles above the planet.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - After a two-day journey, space shuttle Discovery reached the international space station Monday for a weeklong stay to continue construction on the orbiting lab and rotate out a crew member. Discovery commander Mark Polansky closed in on the station at a tenth of a foot per second before latches automatically linked the spacecraft as they flew 220 miles above southeast Asia during a sunrise. "Capture confirmed," Polansky told Mission Control and the space station. About an hour before docking, Discovery did a slow back flip so the space station crew could photograph its belly for any...

Russian Golf Event Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin tees off from the space station during the Expedition 14 spacewalk. Click 'View this Video' at the link.

MOSCOW — Russia's space agency announced Tuesday that Dallas-area businesswoman Anousheh Ansari will fly to the International Space Station next month. Russian news agencies say she'll be the first woman to make a paid voyage to the station. Ansari, a native of Iran, is a co-founder of Richardson-based company Telecom Technologies.

Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable, habitable space complex technology demonstrator, Genesis I, has been successfully deployed and is transmitting data from its 550km (341miles) altitude, 64° inclination orbit, writes Rob Coppinger. An International Space Company Kosmotras Dnepr rocket launched the spacecraft at 14:54GMT from Russia's Yasny base on 12 July. Once in orbit, the spacecraft, based on NASA-developed technology, inflated itself, deployed its solar arrays and transmitted data to Bigelow Aerospace's mission control centre in Houston. "The internal battery is reporting a full charge of 26V, which leads us to believe that the solar arrays have deployed," says Bigelow Aerospace....