Free Republic

CHENNAI : The first step towards cheaper space travel, that of creating a reusable launch vehicle, will be taken on Wednesday with the launch of a space recovery experiment, said R. V. Perumal, Director, Liquid Propulsions Systems Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), here on Thursday. The attempt to recover the satellite would be made on January 22, he said at the inauguration of `Kurukshetra', a national-level inter-collegiate technical festival, organised by students of College of Engineering, Anna University. Around 67 per cent of the total cost of a launch is spent on the single-use launch vehicle. Initiating human colonies...

SCOTTISH scientists have received a massive Nasa grant to work out whether humans can successfully reproduce in space and colonise other worlds. The team have been given £800,000 by the US space agency to breed several generations of fruit flies in zero gravity and then examine any genetic changes in the insects. The unique project is an essential first step towards discovering whether mankind can survive for generations in space and establish permanent homes elsewhere in the solar system. The grant has been awarded to Dr Douglas Armstrong, a behavioural geneticist at Edinburgh University, who hopes to get his experiments...