Life on Mars?

NASA's expected to make a major announcement. Is there evidence of water on Mars?

At CBS News This Morning, "Mars mystery solved? NASA to reveal major discovery."

And at the Guardian UK, "Water on Mars? The buildup to Nasa's 'mystery solved' announcement – live."

NASA Craft Regains Contact With Earth in Pluto Flyby

This is really cool.

At WSJ, "New Horizons Probe Regains Contact With Earth in Pluto Flyby":

The New Horizons spacecraft soared by Pluto Tuesday in a historic climax of a nine-year voyage to the edge of the solar system, as exuberant NASA scientists regained contact with the craft to begin downloading its trove of data on the previously unexplored world.

During its closest approach to Pluto on Tuesday, the probe had been incommunicado, with its antenna aimed away from Earth to carry out hundreds of automated observations.

At 9 p.m., ET, Tuesday, mission managers at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., which is operating the $720 million mission, received the signal that the spacecraft had survived its passage past Pluto and its five moons.

“We have a healthy spacecraft,” announced mission operations manager Alice Bowman, as flight controllers in the control room around her burst into applause. “We did it!”

Earlier on Tuesday, cheering engineers and scientists at the mission control center gave the probe a standing ovation when the countdown clock reached the moment of closest encounter at 7:49 a.m. ET, as the New Horizons spacecraft was expected to fly within 7,800 miles of Pluto, traveling at 31,000 miles an hour.

“Once again we have achieved a historic first,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “The United States is the first nation to reach Pluto, and with this mission has completed the initial survey of our solar system, a remarkable accomplishment that no other nation can match.”

Click through for all the incredible photos.

SpaceX Rocket Failure Raises Questions About Business of Commercial Space Flight

At the Los Angeles Times, "Rocket explosion is a blow to billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX":

An unmanned SpaceX rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station disintegrated over the Florida coast just two minutes after liftoff Sunday — the third major failure for America's commercial space industry in eight months.

The explosion was a blow to billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX aerospace venture, which has shaken the global launch business in recent years by showing it can successfully fly rockets at a fraction of the price of other providers.

It was too early to determine what went wrong Sunday, but executives at the Hawthorne firm vowed to quickly pinpoint the problem. "We will identify the issue we experienced, fix it and get back to flight," Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, said at Sunday news conference.

The failure creates a challenge for NASA. It was the third cargo ship loaded with food, water and other supplies lost in less than a year.

"We expected … we would lose some vehicles," William Gerstenmaier, a NASA associate administrator, said at the news conference. "I didn't think we'd lose them all in a one-year time frame, but we have."

Among the Falcon 9's cargo were parts needed for a water filtration system, said Michael Suffredini, manager of NASA's space station program.

He said the astronauts on the space station have enough food and water for about four months and that another Russian resupply ship was scheduled to launch Friday.

NASA would start planning to bring the astronauts back to Earth, he said, only if vital supplies dwindled to enough for 45 days.

Musk tweeted soon after the failure that there had been "an overpressure event in the upper stage liquid oxygen tank."

"That's all we can say with confidence right now," Musk wrote.

The loss of another commercial rocket operated under a NASA contract comes at a time when the agency's critics in Congress are threatening to reduce funding. Among the targets has been a program under which NASA gave contracts to SpaceX and Boeing Co. to develop spacecraft to fly astronauts to the space station.

SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has also been lobbying for the opportunity to launch the Pentagon's spy satellites and other crucial spacecraft. The company's congressional critics have argued that the upstart is not as reliable as a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture that has long had a lock on the military work.

"SpaceX will now have to work on their technical problems and political problems simultaneously," said Greg Autry, an assistant professor at USC who follows the space industry.

The Falcon 9 rocket had flown successfully 18 times. Sunday's cargo mission was the seventh under the NASA contract.

It was the company's first failure since August 2008, when a different rocket — the Falcon 1 — did not reach orbit.

The explosion happened despite good weather. The countdown went smoothly.

After just over two minutes of flight, NASA lost contact with the rocket. Video showed it shattering apart, leaving a cloud of debris.

The success of the SpaceX mission had become more crucial after a Russian resupply ship spun out of control in late April and was destroyed as it fell back to Earth.

Before that, on Oct. 28, a rocket operated by NASA's other commercial cargo hauler, Orbital Sciences, exploded just seconds after liftoff from a Virginia launch pad.

Orbital executives blamed that failure on a fuel pump in one of the rocket's 40-year-old Russian engines. Orbital has since redesigned the rocket, aiming to begin flying it again next year.

"Orbital Sciences isn't anywhere close to being ready to fly again," said Marco Caceres, an aerospace industry analyst with Teal Group. "It will be months and months before they fly, and we're not sure then if they'll be successful."

NASA officials said that SpaceX would do its own investigation of the failure under the supervision of the Federal Aviation Administration...

More.

Orion Flight Test

At NASA, "NASA’s New Orion Spacecraft Completes First Spaceflight Test."

Also at NYT, "First Flight Test Is Successful for NASA’s Orion Spacecraft."



More video, "Liftoff of Orion"; "Orion Splashdown"; and "Orion From the Recovery Ship."

Rosetta Mission’s Probe Lands on Comet

At WSJ, "European Space Agency’s Philae Is First Craft to Land on Comet in Historic Moment for Space Exploration."

Plus, video at Euro News, "Rosetta lander Philae heads towards comet surface."

Virgin Galactic Spaceship Crashes, Dealing Serious Blow to Richard Branson's Dream for Space Tourism

One of my first thoughts was that Branson's plans for space travel were set back a decade at least.

And that's the conclusion at the Los Angeles Times, "Debris spread over miles after Virgin Galactic spaceship explodes":

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, part of an ambitious commercial space venture founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, crashed during testing Friday and broke into several pieces over the Mojave Desert. One test pilot was killed and another was injured.

"Space is hard and today was a tough day," said George Whitesides, the CEO of Virgin Galactic. “The future rests in many ways on hard, hard days like this. But we believe we owe it to the folks who were flying these vehicles … to move forward, which is what we'll do.”

The news of the second catastrophic accident in a week has sent tremors throughout the burgeoning commercial space industry and is sure to create questions about its future.

Two pilots were aboard SpaceShipTwo, company and FAA officials confirmed. According to the California Highway Patrol, one of the pilots was able to eject and parachute out of the aircraft before being airlifted to a hospital.  The other pilot was killed in the crash. Their names have not been released.

The WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, which carries the SpaceShipTwo, landed safely. National Transportation Safety Board investigators were on their way to the site, which the Kern County Sheriff said was spread over five debris fields over a two- to three-mile area.

The rocket plane was using a new fuel formulation, said Kevin Mickey, CEO of Scaled Composites, which conducted Friday's test flight.

The new fuel mixture had been “tested and proven on the ground many times,” he said.

Virgin Galactic has engaged in a nearly decade-long endeavor to produce the world's first commercial space liner, which would make several trips a day carrying scores of paying customers into space for a brief journey...

Keep reading.

And see the Wall Street Journal, "Virgin Galactic Spacecraft Crashes, Killing One: Accident Raises Further Questions About Future of Space Tourism."

Google Executive Breaks Space-Jump Record

So, how long until Felix Baumgartner suits up to reclaim the world record, heh?

At the New York Times, "Parachutist’s Record Fall: Over 25 Miles in 15 Minutes: Alan Eustace Jumps From Stratosphere, Breaking Felix Baumgartner’s World Record."

Blood Moon

At WSJ, "Photos: Total Eclipse of the MoonLunar Eclipse Brings ‘Blood Moon’ and Shadows to Asia, Americas."

Photos: A total lunar eclipse brings a ‘blood moon’ and shadows to the night's sky: http://t.co/9qSBVhoGwJ pic.twitter.com/GdlPrsNAXh
— WSJ Photos (@WSJphotos) October 8, 2014

SpaceX Unveils Sleek Reusable Dragon V2 Capsule

At Instapundit, "Just in time..."

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Completes Supersonic Test Flight

I love this ship (I just hate the political hypocrisy).

Via Theo Spark, "SpaceShipTwo's 3rd Powered Flight Soars to New Heights."


Also at Daily Mail, "Giant leap for space tourism! The moment Virgin Galactic's third test flight reaches an all time high altitude of 71,000 FEET."

China's Lunar Landing is No Big Deal

I yawned when I heard about it.

But see Telegraph UK, "Why America lacks lunar ambition":

Barack Obama split the US space community when he abandoned plans for American astronauts to return to the Moon and set new sights for Nasa.

While China celebrated its lunar landing, America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration has no plans to return to the Moon.

Many Americans believed they had won the space race when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969 and Neil Armstrong set the first feet in the lunar surface, famously declaring: “This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Another 11 US astronauts walked on the Moon over the next three years. And nobody has been back since. A year after taking office, President Barack Obama controversially ditched the Constellation human space flight programme pursued by his predecessor George W Bush and with it plans for new lunar landings by 2020.

Instead, he set Nasa’s sights on further-flung targets, most ambitiously to tow an asteroid back to Earth and to launch a manned mission to Mars within the next 20 years. That left US space operations in what is known as near-Earth orbit to the private sector.

“Nasa is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Charles Bolden, the agency’s administrator, told a panel this year.

Mr Obama’s decision to axe the Constellation programme and bypass the Moon has split the US space community. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step on the lunar crust, agrees that returning there is a waste of limited American financial resources.

"Do not put Nasa astronauts on the moon,” he wrote in his book Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration. They have other places to go.”

And in the meantime, Nasa’s Mars Curiosity rover vehicle continues to send back intriguing evidence that the Red Planet may have once supported life.

But other space veterans and experts believe that the US is making a disastrous mistake. Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, another Moon-walker, was scathing critical of the Obama space policy. "It's bad for the country," he said. "This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism."

I'm with Aldrin on this one, and amazingly, with the president as well.

Unmanned U.S. Commercial Cargo Ship Flies to International Space Station

At Reuters, "Commercial cargo ship reaches International Space Station."

And CSM, "Are we entering the age of private spaceflight?":

Two private American companies – SpaceX and Orbital Sciences – are now responsible for restocking the International Space Station.

New Images From NASA's Cassini Spacecraft

Amazing.

At LAT on Twitter.

Earth, as seen from 900 million miles away: http://t.co/s3hJRfLeCh pic.twitter.com/moEii9asnA via @deborahnetburn
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 23, 2013

Astronaut Chris Hadfield Sings David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' in Space

A wonderful video:

Background at the Next Web, "Commander Chris Hadfield signs off from space with epic cover of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’."

Virgin Galactic Successful Test Flight

At Telegraph UK, "Sir Richard Branson watches Virgin Galactic spaceship's first rocket test."

Russia Meteor Shower

This is trippy.

At Reuters, "Possible meteor shower reported in eastern Russia."

More dashboard cam footage of meteorite crash youtu.be/90Omh7_I8vI
— Joe Brooks (@joebrooks) February 15, 2013

Added: At the New York Times, "Earth May Not Be Ready for the Next Close Encounter."

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad Prepares for Space Flight

At Gateway Pundit, "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: I Am Ready to Be First Iranian in Space." (At Memeorandum.).

IMAGE CREDIT: Blazing Cat Fur.

Felix Baumgartner Breaks Sound Barrier

At Fox News, "Fearless Felix Baumgartner Safely Lands Record Breaking 24-mile Leap to Earth."

Also at the New York Times, "Felix Baumgartner Was Just Thinking About Coming Home." (At Memeorandum.)

Space Shuttle Endeavor Completes Move to California Science Center

The Los Angeles Times has had pretty amazing coverage of the shuttle Endeavor. I love this picture below, from the front page of today's paper. The caption reads, "TRAYMOND HARRIS, left, and Ryan Hudge play basketball as the shuttle Endeavor passes by in Inglewood on Saturday." And here's the report there, under the photograph, "Shuttle crawls obstacle course."

ABC News 7 had live coverage of the final stage of the move today, and the here's the update at the Times, "Endeavour within sight of Exposition Park."

And from yesterday, "Space shuttle Endeavour rolls on toward its new home."

Space Shuttle Endeavour Moves to Science Center

Amazing pictures at the Los Angeles Times, "Space shuttle Endeavour rolls through the streets of L.A."

And see, "Shuttle arrives at Forum ahead of schedule."

Despite crawling along at a speed of about 2 mph, the space shuttle Endeavour appears to be making good time on its journey home to the California Science Center.

The massive space vehicle pulled up to the Fourm in Inglewood around 7:30 a.m. Saturday, and was greeted by thousands gathered there to see it. It arrived more than an hour ahead of schedule, but Southern California Edison crew members said it will remain at the Fourm until 9:30 a.m. as planned. The crews cleared some transmission lines early and movers decided to proceed.

A celebration at the Forum, which includes music and some public speakers, was set to begin about 9 a.m.

Officials are considering whether they can get the shuttle to the California Science Center before sunset, which occurs at 6:20 p.m. Saturday.