The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has successfully completed testing of the nose landing gear for its Dream Chaser manned reusable spacecraft.
The competition heats up: From Virgin Galactic come two announcements today:
The second is really the big news, especially as it appears they already have some customers.
LauncherOne will be a two-stage vehicle capable of carrying up to 500 pounds (225 kilograms) to orbit for prices below $10 million. The rocket will be launched from Virgin Galactic’s proven WhiteKnightTwo, the uniquely capable aircraft also designed to carry SpaceShipTwo aloft to begin her suborbital missions. Thanks to the extreme flexibility of air launch, Virgin Galactic’s customers will enjoy reduced infrastructure costs in addition to the wide range of possible launch locations tailored to individual mission requirements and weather conditions. Branson and other senior executives announced that work has already begun on the vehicle.
Orwell would be proud: India is in the process of biometrically identifying every one of it 1.2 billion citizens.
An indoor climbing wall that never ends.
The rise and fall of Germany’s solar power industry.
The Russian company building that country’s Glonass GPS system is under investigation by the police for the embezzlement of more than a half billion rubles.
A student experiment — successfully flown up and down to ISS by Dragon — is apparently a failure because no one on ISS ever turned it on.
Per instructions from NanoRacks, the Houston company that works with NASA to integrate such deliveries, Warren packed his worms, or C. elegans, into a glass ampule, or tube, then packed that tube into a larger one containing a liquid “growth medium” for the worms. An astronaut aboard the space station was to crack the outer ampule in a way that would release the worms into the surrounding liquid. It never happened.
The article is very diplomatic about this, but it is very clear that either the astronauts on ISS screwed up, or NASA did by not giving them clear instructions.
Saturn from above: Cassini has shifted its orbit so that it can look down on Saturn and its rings.
Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of duct tape involved.
Cool images of the opening of the floodgates of a Chinese dam.
