NASA has repeatedly sent scale-sized versions of its planned Orion spaceship plummeting back to Earth in a series tests to pinpoint the best way to return future astronauts safely back to terra firma. The drop tests, performed at NASA’s Virginia-based Langley Research Center, are just one of several technical milestones the Orion spacecraft and Ares [...]
NASA mission managers will wait until early April to pick a new launch date for the space shuttle Atlantis pending additional repairs and checks of its hail-battered fuel tank, top agency officials said Wednesday. The U.S. space agency is eyeing April 10 as the decision day on whether to press ahead with a possible mid-May [...]
A Texas company has drawn up plans for a human expedition to the moon to seek the raw ingredients for what amounts to an orbiting gas station. Under the plan, from Bill Stone of Austin’s Stone Aerospace Inc., a vanguard team of industrialists would explore Shackleton Crater at the moon’s South Pole to determine how [...]
Kennedy Space Center Director Bill Parsons this morning asked for the Brevard County Commission’s support lobbying for increased NASA funding. Parsons said another tight budget next year could lengthen the transition from the space shuttle to its successor, Orion, potentially costing Brevard space-related jobs. Read more
NASA will likely shut down its Institute for Advanced Concepts, which funds research into futuristic – and often far-out – ideas in spaceflight and aeronautics, officials say. The controversial move highlights the budgetary pressures the agency is facing as it struggles to retire the space shuttles by 2010 and develop their replacement. The NASA Institute [...]
ASA administrator Michael Griffin has warned the US Congress that he expects the four-year US manned spaceflight capability gap between the Space Shuttle’s 2010 retirement and its replacement’s first launch to grow, unless the agency’s fiscal year 2008 exploration systems budget is fully funded. Cuts imposed in February by Congress on the FY2007 budget have [...]
NASA is undergoing what is arguably its biggest transition since the end of the Apollo program and the beginning of the Shuttle program over 30 years ago. Now it’s the Shuttle’s turn to go the way of the Saturn 5 rocket and Apollo spacecraft, to be replaced by something that combines some elements of both [...]
Among the actions NASA recommends in its fiscal 2007 operating plan is shutting down the Lunar Precursor and Robotic Program Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, where a whole generation of unmanned orbiters, rovers, hoppers and penetrators was under consideration as scouts for a human landing on the moon. Management of the Lunar Crater Observation [...]
At today’s final Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) Appropriations Subcommittee hearing focused on innovation, Chairman Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) noted her concern for the future of NASA’s budget and the nation’s space program, pledging to fight again with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) for a $1 billion increase to NASA’s top line. At today’s hearing, NASA [...]
NASA Plum Brook Station has won a $63 million contract to test the Orion spacecraft, the spacecraft that will carry astronauts for NASA’s planned return to the moon. Plans call for testing Orion at Plum Brook in 2011 or 2012. That’s a few years off, but Friday’s announcement provides good news about the future of [...]