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William Shatner's much-anticipated trip to the edge of space will have to wait a day because high winds in west Texas prompted spaceflight company Blue Origin to postpone the voyage. Originally scheduled for Tuesday, the launch from the spaceport in Van Horn, Texas, will now take place at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, Blue Origin said in a statement Sunday. "As part of today's Flight Readiness Review, the mission operations team confirmed the vehicle has met all mission requirements and astronauts began their training today," Blue Origin said. "Weather is the only gating factor for the launch window." The National Weather Service...

n July of this year (2015), NASA’s New Horizons mission will fly past Pluto and its moons. It will map the surface of the Plutonian system in unprecedented detail, revealing craters and other surface features for the first time. In preparation for the deluge of newly discovered craters, mountains, crevasses and other surface features, Mamajek et al. discuss a naming system for Pluto and its moons. Pluto is one of the last large planetesimals in the Solar system to have its surface imaged in detail. Pluto’s surface features will reveal the history of its life in the alien conditions at...

Leonard Nimoy, who lived long and prospered, died Friday at his Los Angeles home. The creator of Mr. Spock, television’s most beloved pointy-eared half-Vulcan, was 83 and had suffered for several years from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), which makes it difficult to breathe. “I quit smoking 30 yrs ago,” he tweeted last week. “Not soon enough. I have COPD. Grandpa says, quit now!! LLAP.” “LLAP” was Spock’s best-known catch phrase: Live long and prosper. To many of his fans, Leonard Nimoy was a one-hit wonder. One hit that lasted half a century. Nimoy created the beloved Mr. Spock in...

Not sure about their posting rules so I'll leave this as-is.

The Red Bull Stratos team has kept itself under wraps until today’s press conference at the New York Academy of Sciences in NYC. The ambitious project marks the first major attempt at breaking an old but daunting skydiving record, one that starts at the edge of space. In 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of a capsule at 102,800 feet above the Earth’s surface and, in just minutes returned to the surface by simply falling. The falling part was easy. The surviving part was not—his first jump, from the Excelsior I module nearly ended in disaster when...

Nobel-winning boffin slams ISS, manned spaceflight 'Infantile fixation on putting people into space' By Lewis Page, The Register, Wednesday 19th September 2007 A Nobel laureate physicist has poured scorn on human space exploration, saying "the whole manned spaceflight programme, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value". Professor Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physics, was speaking at a workshop in Baltimore. His remarks were reported by Space.com. Weinberg had especially harsh words for the International Space Station (ISS), saying that it was "an orbital turkey... No...

Never mind sex in space; what about death up there? ASSOCIATED PRESS May 2, 2007 CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – How do you get rid of the body of a dead astronaut on a three-year mission to Mars and back? When should the plug be pulled on a critically ill astronaut who is using up precious oxygen and endangering the rest of the crew? Should NASA employ DNA testing to weed out astronauts who might get a disease on a long flight? With NASA planning to land on Mars 30 years from now, and with the recent discovery of the most...

One of the long-running challenges faced by proponents of space exploration has been finding compelling reasons to sell such efforts—particularly big-ticket government programs—to the general public. This is a challenge in large part because, at least in the United States, there are few coherent attitudes about space. Public reaction to space in general and NASA in particular is a mix of wonderment, primarily in response to images returned by the Hubble Space Telescope, Mars Exploration Rovers, and other missions; and skepticism about the costs, risks, and problems associated with the shuttle, station, and the new exploration initiative. The prevailing attitude,...

NASA managers on Saturday picked July 1 to launch the first space shuttle in almost a year for a test-flight mission that will try out inspection methods and repairs that were devised following the Columbia disaster. The launch of the seven crew members aboard Discovery in early July improved the chances that the 12-day mission would be extended by a day to add an important third spacewalk. The launch date was picked after two days of meetings by scores of NASA's top managers and engineers at the Kennedy Space Center. The most contentious debate at the meeting focused on whether...

California lawmakers took steps this week to provide an outlay of funds for the inland Mojave Spaceport, an action also designed to keep the state aggressive in public space travel and space enterprise. The California Legislature has moved a bill to invest $11 million in the Mojave Spaceport. Noting competition from other states and nations, the Senate Committee on Transportation voted on a bipartisan 8-1 vote in favor of Senate Bill 1671 by State Senator Roy Ashburn that will ensure a competitive advantage for the first, and only, inland spaceport in the United States. The measure would establish a loan...

NASA issued this week a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) focused on what's needed in human and robotic technology to put into high gear any Moon, Mars, and beyond space exploration. As part of a sweeping roster of needs, NASA is asking for proposals in the fields of artificial gravity, inflatable structures, as well as living-off-the-land machinery.

<p>WASHINGTON — President Bush will seek to boost NASA's budget by $1 billion over five years to help pay for his plan to put a base on the moon and to mount a manned expedition to Mars (search) later in the century, a senior administration official said Tuesday.</p>

In the news recently was a statement by Klaus Toepfer, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), where it was stated that said "China's aim of quadrupling its economy by 2020 can only occur if developed nations radically change their consumption habits to free up scarce resources for the world's poor." As an further example (from the article on CNN.com)

PROJECT OVERVIEW ABSTRACT Electrical activity emanating from the brain is displayed in the form of four types of brainwaves that are associated with specific cognitive functions and that vary in level of activity. The team’s experiment will measure a test subject’s level of brainwave activity while performing a variety of tasks in a virtual reality environment in zero-gravity. By immersing the test subject in a virtual reality simulation, the team will be able to duplicate many of the cognitive and motor functions required of astronauts working in space. Effects of a short-term microgravity environment, such as vertigo and spatial disorientation,...