PrairiePundit

AP/Houston Chronicle: SpaceX sent a rocket soaring toward orbit Monday night with 11 small satellites, its first mission since an accident last summer. Then it landed the leftover 15-story booster back on Earth, safely. It was the first time a rocket returned to land vertically at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and a tremendous success for SpaceX. Company employees broke into cheers and chants following the touchdown 10 minutes after liftoff. Previous landing attempts failed, but those aimed for an ocean platform. SpaceX employees jammed company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, anxiously awaiting success outside Mission Control. They cheered at full throttle when the first stage separated cleanly two minutes into flight and reoriented itself for an unprecedented return to Cape Canaveral. Then the roar became deafening, as TV cameras showed the first-stage booster landing right on a giant X at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. SpaceX commentators called it "incredibly excit...

BBC: Texas wants to reclaim the mantle of space travel hub it won as the home of Nasa by taking advantage of the expanding private-sector spaceflight industry. Budget cuts led to the end of the space shuttle programme in 2011 and a seemingly diminished role for Nasa, Texas and even the US in space travel. Nasa started having to pay Russia to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). At the same time, however, Nasa worked with the private sector to support commercial space travel. Ever a business-savvy state, Texas is doing all it can to entice the private spaceflight industry, starting by securing its own space port. "We are not trying to reinvent anything, but want to grow into the future of spaceflight," says Bob Mitchell, president of the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership that works with Nasa to identify potential partners. "Houston is the home of human space exploration." Texas has set the gold standard for attracting commercial ...

Geek Wire: From the outside, Boeing’s new spacecraft mimics the Apollo-era capsules from back in the day. The interior, however, is all about the future. NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik readies for flight-suit evaluations of the Boeing CST-100 capsule Monday in Houston. Photo via NASA. Boeing today showed off the inside of its CST-100 , a commercial spacecraft the company is building in hopes of flying NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. On Monday at Boeing’s Product Support Center in Houston, two NASA astronauts donned the classic orange spacesuits and went through flight evaluations inside the CST-100, which features tablet technology and the same blue LED lighting found in Boeing’s newer commercial aircraft like the Dreamliner. “It’s an upgrade,” said NASA astronauts Serena Aunon in the video below. “It’s an American vehicle — of course it’s an upgrade.” Boeing is developing the CST-100 as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program, in which private comp...

The speech was in Austin at the SXSW.  I did see a couple of Elon Musk's Tesla cars on trailers being pulled by pickup trucks.  That obviously gives them greater range.  I like the space port idea to be launched from the tip of Texas at Boco Chica where I have gone fishing in my high school days.

LA Times: Curiosity could pollute any water it may find on Mars For a lead headline, it seems to be making some wild assumptions about finding water and then polluting it.  I guess they are worried about Earth cooties.

Washington Post: Neil Armstrong , the astronaut who marked an epochal achievement in exploration with “one small step” from the  Apollo 11 lunar module  on July 20, 1969, becoming the first person to walk on the moon, died Aug. 25 in the Cincinnati area. He was 82.  His family announced the death in a statement and attributed it to “complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures.”  A taciturn engineer and test pilot who was never at ease with his fame, Mr. Armstrong was among the most heroized Americans of the 1960s Cold War space race. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” he is famous for saying as he stepped on the moon, an indelible quotation beamed to a worldwide audience in the hundreds of millions.  Twelve years after the Soviet satellite Sputnik reached space first, deeply alarming U.S. officials, and after President John F. Kennedy in 1961 declared it a national priority to land an American on the moon “before this...

Congratulations to the engineers and scientist who made this happen.  It is an amazing feat.

Daily Mail: The Nasa 'space drink' that can rub out sun spots: Fruit juice developed to protect astronauts reduces wrinkles and reverses the telltale signs of ageing in four months It cost much more than the original NASA drink of Tang.  However it appears to have dramatic results in reducing aging caused by exposure to the sun.  I suspect they could sell a lot of it in California and Florida. It has been awhile since NASA has had a commercial spin off. They need the publicity to stay relevant since they have turned our astronauts into hitch hikers.

Houston Chronicle: Even as SpaceX continued to make history on Friday by berthing its Dragon capsule to the  International Space Station , the state of Texas has stepped up its efforts to woo the company here. State officials are developing an incentive package to encourage SpaceX to build a spaceport near Brownsville. The Hawthorne, Calif.-based company is also considering launch sites in Florida and Puerto Rico. Two sources familiar with the negotiations said the state is working on a multimillion-dollar package that could include funding from the  Texas Enterprise Fund , infrastructure support from the state  Department of Transportation  and assistance from the  Texas Workforce Commission , among others. The discussions come about a month after SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Texas could be bringing more to the table. "There's been a lot of good action by the authorities in the Brownsville area; there's not been that much at the ...

Houston Chronicle: While you were sleeping: Private company makes history with successful launch A private company now has more launch capacity than NASA and at a significantly lower cost.  If they can successfully dock with the space station,perhaps the US will not need to hitch hike with the Russians.   Commercial space flight will also free us from the tyranny of government management.

Daily Mail: What if we ARE all alone? Scientists say Earth may be a 'one-off fluke' and the Milky Way's billions of other planets may all be lifeless At this point in our knowledge there is more evidence to support this theory than the alternative.

Bill Gertz: China’s People’s Liberation Army is preparing to destroy U.S. computer and network infrastructure in future attacks and knock out satellites with microwave pulses, according to recently translated Chinese military writings. A senior colonel in the General Staff Fourth Department—the cyber warfare and electronic spying section known as 4PLA—wrote in one article that Chinese electronic network attack plans call for a “system of systems” destruction plan. U.S. cyber warfare combat capability “forms a great threat for our military in terms of carrying out joint campaigns and operations, and especially information operations,” wrote Col. Lin Shishan. “In this regard, we must establish the information combat concept of ‘attack and destruction of system of systems,’ and from the point of view of structural resistance, regard information systems of the main opponent as a whole, look for crucial points in the architecture which will serve as precise attack targets of inform...

Washington Post: The United States may be falling behind in transportation, education and health care down here on Earth, but its military infrastructure is certainly way ahead when it comes to imagery and communications satellites armed with defensive and offensive capabilities out there in space.  That the United States leads in the militarization of space is apparent from House and Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearings this month on the fiscal 2013 budget of $9.7 billion for military space programs.  Like many Pentagon programs, these have had amazing successes but also billion-dollar overruns and costly failures.  A  Government Accountability Office  (GAO) report, released at Wednesday’s Senate hearing, showed major Defense space acquisition programs “have increased by about $11.6 billion — 321 percent — from initial estimates for fiscal years 2011 through 2016.” The military services see them as the future.  “Our assured access to spac...

Toby Harnden: Romney's Moon Mockery vs. Lunar Tunes Newt I think Romney is closer to the mark on what our priorities should be.  Newt is probably a decade or more too soon.

Guardian: Two Canadian teenagers have sent a  Lego  man into the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere using a home-stitched parachute and equipment found on Craigslist. Two weeks ago, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, attached the plastic figurine replete with maple leaf flag to a helium balloon, which they sent 80,000 feet into the air. The pair managed to capture the entire journey into the blackness of space , including the descent, which lasted 97 minutes, using four cameras, at an entire cost of just £254. ...   You can watch the video of the ride with a  Link to this video .  It is really kind of cool.

The new Mars Rover vehicle will explore for evidence of life on Mars.

Sunday Telegraph: Floating 200 miles above earth is the latest symbol of China's determination to become a true global superpower. When the Tiangong 1 module docked successfully with the Shenzhou 8 spacecraft in the early hours of Thursday morning, China took a giant step towards its dream of becoming the pre-eminent power in space, a position some experts believe it may claim by 2040. For the millions of Chinese who stayed up to watch the rendezvous of the two unmanned craft live on television, its success wasn't just a matter of enormous pride that China had become only the third nation after the US and Russia to master orbital docking. It was also a message to the rest of the world of China's ever-growing reach and ambition, as each successive mission in the country's space programme narrows the technological gap with its rivals. At a time when the US is mired in an economic downturn and both public and financial support for the space agency Nasa is a...

BBC: What if particles really can exceed the speed of light? It is a fascinating and provocative question. But first, it should be said that  Thursday's news  that physicists have seen subatomic particles called neutrinos exceed the Universe's speed limit is a picture of science still at work. The researchers at Cern in Switzerland and Gran Sasso in Italy have tried really hard to find what they might be doing wrong - over three years and thousands of experiments - because they can hardly believe what they are seeing. The publication of their results is a call for help to pick holes in their methods, and save physics as we now know it. "The scientists are right to be extremely cautious about interpreting these findings," said Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist from the University of Surrey, who suggested that a simple error in the measurement is probably the source of all the fuss. Continue reading the main story “ Start Quote But he has gone further. ...

More on how it was done here .

NY Times: Prospects seemed to dim on Thursday for a timely launching of a Russian rocket that would carry American astronauts to the International Space Station next month, with Russian space officials temporarily grounding a similar rocket after one crashed shortly after takeoff on Wednesday. With the end of NASA’s space shuttle program last month, American astronauts must travel into space on Russian Soyuz rockets. When one of them crashed over Siberia on Wednesday, concerns began to mount. Russian space officials canceled the Friday launching of a Soyuz rocket that was to carry a navigation satellite for Glonass, the Russian equivalent of the American GPS system. Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin also ordered an overhaul of the safety procedures at the Russian space agency, according to his spokesman. The changes will affect how the agency checks rockets, satellites and space vehicles it buys from Russian manufacturers and will influence its prelaunching procedures. In the ...