The competition heats up: India has now set January 5 as the date for the test launch of its homebuilt powerful GSLV rocket.
India’s needs this more powerful rocket if they are going to be a serious player in the new colonial movement in space. They have had many problems over the past decade trying to get it operational. Maybe now they will finally succeed.
Today’s spacewalk by two Russian astronauts on ISS set a new Russian duration record though one of the two commercial cameras installed was unable to transmit its data to the ground.
For reasons that are unclear, the astronauts were then instructed to disconnect both cameras and bring them back inside ISS. This caused the cancellation of a number of other tasks and was the reason the spacewalk was the longest ever by Russian astronauts.
The Russians on ISS are doing their own spacewalk today, for profit.
They are installing two cameras for a Canadian company that will beam down high resolution commercial images of the Earth’s surface.
Another successful Proton rocket launch took place today in Russia, putting a Russian communications satellite into orbit.
This is the fourth successful Proton launch since July’s spectacular failure, suggesting that the Russians have gotten the rocket’s manufacturing process back on track.
The competition heats up: The Russians have delayed the first launch of a new Soyuz rocket for at least a week.
No reason for the delay was announced. The rocket is an entirely new design, with an upper stage expected to cost less to make.
The companies building manned spacecraft for the United States all appear to be on track.
The report gives a nice overview of the recent achievements of all three companies, and suggests that the U.S. will once again have a manned spacecraft capability before the decade has ended coming from more than one design.
The top ten states for job growth.
There isn’t a clear common political thread here, but it is worth noting that all of the top five and seven of the ten have all-Republican governments.
It isn’t the party that matters, it is the philosophy of the members of that party that matters. And you are more likely to find politicians who support freedom, competition, and capitalism in the Republican Party.
NASA and Orbital Sciences have set January 7 as the launch date for the Cygnus cargo mission to ISS.
They did some rescheduling at Wallops Island to allow the Cygnus launch to happen earlier.
India has set January 5 as the launch date for its next attempt to launch is home-built GSLV rocket.
An update on the Google Lunar X-Prize competition.
A number of teams have dropped out, narrowing the competition to eighteen teams.
