The asteroid is coming! The asteroid is coming!
The fly-by of the large asteroid 1998 QE2 tomorrow at about 5 pm (Eastern) is causing a lot of hype. It is interesting, but hardly the big news event NASA and others want to make it. The scientists will like it because they get another close look at an asteroid. Others are using it to hype up the threat of asteroids, though that threat is not changed in any way by this fly-by.
Planetary Resources today announced a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for its space telescope Arkyd.
Forgive me if I am less than enthusiastic about this. Supposedly Planetary Resources had big money backing from a lot of wealthy people, including some Silicon Valley Google billionaires. Why then do they need this campaign? It makes me suspect that the company is an emperor with no clothes.
The competition heats up: Japan has decided to develop its first new rocket in two decades and use the private-sector to reduce costs.
The article is very vague about how Japan will shift design and construction to the private sector. They need to do this, however, if they want to compete, as their space agency has been very inefficient at accomplishing anything cheaply or quickly.
The next crew of astronauts to ISS blasted off today on a Soyuz rocket.
They are taking the fast route to ISS, which means they will dock less than six hours after launch. Update: As noted by Trent in the comments, the docking went like clockwork.
The first X-37b to fly in space has now completed five months of its second mission.
Sunjammer, NASA’s next solar sail experiment.
Though the article headline focuses on the addition of space weather instruments to this solar sail, the article says very little about those instruments. One, Swan, is described as a “wind instrument”, which probably means it would study the solar wind. The other instrument would study the Earth’s magnetic field. Both instruments are needed to track the effect of the Sun on local space weather, since the one satellite we have to do this, Ace, is now more than a decade past its expiration date.
Solar Impulse has completed the second leg of its journey to fly across the United States powered only by the sun.
The Solar Impulse has broken its own record for the longest distance flight of a solar-powered aircraft following the second leg of its journey across the USA. Solar Impulse touched down in Texas at 1:08 a.m. local time after a flight of 18 hours 21 minutes having covered at least 868 miles (1,397 km). Two different distances have been reported for the flight. The Solar Impulse website says the flight “amounted” to 868 miles (1,397 km). However, according to a Phys.org report, Solar Impulse covered a distance of 1,541 km (which it rounds to 950 miles, though this is not the precise conversion).
It is thought the two distances exist because the plane actually lost ground during part of its flight due to headwinds.
New details about Stratolaunch, its gigantic carrier airplane, the largest ever built, and the rocket that it will carry.
Like SpaceX’s Grassshopper, the goal here is to make the first stage completely reusable, thereby reducing the cost of launch significantly.
The competition heats up: The Russian deputy prime minister told students at the Moscow Aviation Institute on Thursday that they expect their first launch from their new spaceport in Vostochny to occur in November 2015.
He also said that they want to name the new town they are building at the site after Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Sea Launch announced today it plans four launches in 2014.
The article gives a nice thumbnail summary of the history of the company, including the launch failures that put it into bankruptcy and forced Boeing, the U.S. partner, to get out, leaving the company mostly in the hands of the Russian company Energia.
A Russian paid 1.2 million euros to fly on SpaceShipTwo with actor Leonardo DiCaprio at a charity auction at the Cannes film festival on Thursday.
Ecuador’s first satellite, launched last month, has been hit with debris from an old Russian rocket.
It is unclear yet how much damage was caused.
