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Rather than dismissing billionaires’ space adventures, we should celebrate their risk-taking endeavors and be inspired to take risks in our lives.Billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos both rocked to the edge of space and safely landed back on Earth this month. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, plans to make a similar trip.Many here on Earth dismissed these billionaire entrepreneurs’ space travel and competition as a waste of time, money, and other valuable resources, which could be better spent solving earthly problems such as hunger and poverty. Critics shrug off such space travel as billionaires one-upping each...

China’s new space plane returned to Earth on Sept. 6th. But it left something behind in orbit, an item of unknown character called “Object A” by the US military. Last night in the Netherlands, Marco Langbroek tracked it across the sky using a hand-pointed video camera. “It showed slow but marked brightness changes, between magnitude +4 and invisible (fainter than +7),” says Langbroek. “The light curve shows two brightness peaks, and two major fading episodes. Peak-to-peak period is about 80 seconds, so if this is due to a tumble, it is a slow tumble.“ Object A is also a source...

China launched the space station in September 2016, and quickly sent up a pair of taikonauts, Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong, to conduct a variety of experiments on a 30 day mission. China launched a second, uncrewed mission in April 2017 to refuel the station to test out a new spacecraft and conduct some “robotic demonstrations.” That was the last mission to the station, which was never intended as a permanent habitat in orbit. Along with the Tiangong-1, the two stations provided the Chinese space program with valuable experience in orbit. They demonstrated not only that they could launch and...

US President Donald Trump announced a sweeping new space policy on Monday that will focus both on reducing satellite clutter in space as well as creating a specific “Space Force” as the newest branch of the military. “It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” said Trump, saying that he wished to revive the US’ flagging space program that has been bogged down by rising costs and a lack of political will. Trump said he does not want “China and Russia and other countries leading us.” […] He also...

President Donald Trump wants to send man back to the moon — and on to Mars. Trump signed a policy directive Monday instructing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to “refocus America’s space program on human exploration and discovery.” The move, Trump said, “marks an important step in returning American astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 for long-time exploration.” “This time we will not only plant our flag and leave our footprint,” he said, “we will establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars, and perhaps someday, to many worlds beyond.” …

Moonwalkers and dozens of others who took part in NASA's storied Apollo program paid tribute Thursday to the three astronauts killed in a fire 50 years ago. On the eve of the Apollo 1 anniversary, hundreds gathered at Kennedy Space Center to honor Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. They died during a countdown rehearsal at the launch pad, inside their burning spacecraft, on Jan. 27, 1967 On Friday, NASA is opening an Apollo 1 exhibit featuring the hatch that prevented the three astronauts from escaping. It has been concealed for the past half-century along with the capsule. The...

Chinese officials unveiled plans for Monday’s launch of the country’s latest space mission in which two astronauts will be blasted into space and will dock with an orbiting space lab. The Shenzhou 11 spacecraft will be launched at 7:30 a.m., said Wu Ping, deputy director of China’s manned space engineering office, in a televised news conference. The Shenzhou mission will take off aboard a Long March-2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China. …

The damage caused by ending the Space Shuttle Program prematurely -- before an alternative man-rated U.S. conveyance system was available – continues to build up. Not only do we not have an American-led way to get humans into space, we are now ending – or cutting short – our capacity to deliver national security assets into deep orbit. We are knowingly allowing a gap to emerge between launch capacity we have now – which depends on the RD-180 Russian-made rocket engine – and an uncertain future time, when we may have our own rocket engine to power heavy-lift rockets. Simply...

Rosetta's lander lasted just 60 hours on a comet after it bounced into the dark shadows of a cliff, where its solar panels couldn't power the vehicle. Why didn't it carry a more reliable power source, say a nuclear battery like one that's unfailingly fueled Voyager for decades? It's a simple question with a fascinating answer, one that begins with the Cold War and ends with the future space exploration. When it comes to space travel, plutonium-238 is the perfect fuel: long-lasting and, as I'll explain later, relatively safe. Without it, we have no hope of going much further than...

A Russian official angered over new sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia over the Ukraine crisis is suggesting that American astronauts get to the International Space Station by using trampolines instead of rockets. "The United States introduced sanctions against our space industry... We warned them, we will reply to statements with statements, to actions with actions," Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who heads Russia's defense industry, said on Twitter, according to Reuters. American astronauts depend on Russian rockets to get to the ISS, but after the U.S. imposed sanctions – which deny export licenses for high-tech items that...

What in another year might have been a routine hearing about NASA’s annual budget request turned into a heated, and sometimes partisan, exchange about the agency’s internal security practices and the broad state of the U.S. human spaceflight program. In theory, the purpose of the April 8 hearing of the House Appropriations, commerce, justice, science subcommittee was to allow lawmakers charged with writing NASA’s 2015 appropriation to ask questions about the roughly $17.5 billion budget request the agency released in March. In practice, the hearing was a double feature that paired a review of security practices at NASA field centers,...

Leadership: Putting an economic and political squeeze on Moscow over the Ukraine crisis could bring another Obama chicken home to roost — our president killed the U.S. space program and made us dependent on Putin. Since 2011, when America's space shuttle fleet was retired and our space program was dispersed to various museums, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which proudly put the first human beings, Americans, on the moon some 45 years ago, has largely been fixated on things like monitoring nonexistent climate change and Muslim outreach. Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/030514-692270-russia-could-deny-space-access-over-ukraine.htm#ixzz2v9AKHsSL Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter...

China’s latest manned spacecraft successfully blasted off Tuesday on a 15-day mission to dock with a space lab and educate young people about science. The Shenzhou 10 capsule carrying three astronauts lifted off as scheduled at 5:38 p.m. (0938 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert. It is China’s fifth manned space mission and its longest. …

1950s - 1960s: Dog Space Suits

In case you just can’t get enough impact news, it looks like Mars may actually get hit by a comet in 2014! As it stands right now, the chance of a direct impact are small, but it’s likely Mars will get pelted by the debris associated with the comet. The comet is called C/2013 A1, discovered on Jan. 3, 2013 by the Australian veteran comet hunter Robert McNaught. Extrapolating its orbit, they found it will make a very near pass of Mars around Oct. 19, 2014, missing the planet by the nominal distance of about 100,000 kilometers. Observations taken at...

........Of all the waste by the Federal government and with all the other Federal agencies that could be moved to privatization, Obama selects our space program. This detracts from the progress of our missile technology that is shared with our military, it inhibits our national defense, and it damages our national identity.Space X is Obama's choice for supplanting NASA. It appears Obama has picked another loser. Move over Solyndra.Let's begin with the performance to date of the ersatz space program called Space X....."Thus far, NASA has awarded at least $2.1 billion in SAA money to private space companies,including a total...

The passing of Neil Armstrong on Saturday appears to be coinciding with a decline in American manned space exploration, as Asian countries develop plans to expand their footprint on the moon and in outer space. China, Japan, and India have all unveiled aggressive space initiatives in the recent months and years. New Delhi has said it plans to launch the first manned mission by 2016 and a Mars orbiter in the coming years. The Japanese already participate in the International Space Station program and have discussed studying asteroids for potential mineral extraction. But China has emerged as the most likely...

Despite the news and pictures from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, America's once great space program is on life support because we no longer have a serious manned space exploration program....And the Obama Administration's unimaginative and amateurish vision for space exploration -- even if successful -- will not revive the dying program. It merely follows the disturbing pattern of the Solyndra scandal, funneling tax dollars to Obama donors and fundraisers. [SNIP] ....SpaceX collects tax dollars so that it can learn how to build and develop something that other companies were doing a generation ago. It is curious that SpaceX is now...

The United States remains the top dog in space, but it is losing its competitive advantage as the nation’s space program undergoes a series of major transitions while other nations, in particular China, improve their space capabilities. So says Futron’s 2012 Space Competitiveness Index, which was released on Wednesday. It’s the fifth anniversary edition of the report, and the fifth year in a row in which Futron has documented America’s declining lead in space. What a fun read. Perhaps to offset that depressingly familiar conclusion, Futron has spiced up the report by adding five emerging space powers to the 10...