Extracting resources from the moon plays an important part in the US Congress- endorsed vision for space exploration. The powdery lunar surface and the fact that the moon has only a sixth of the earth’s gravity “makes it ideal for cheap mining and mineral processing”. The minerals present on the moon include anorthite, which is [...]
SpaceX has been approved for a five-year contract to launch its rockets from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Launch Complex 40 (LC-40) is located on Merritt Island, Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was previously used by the U.S. Air Force for Titan III and Titan IV launches and to [...]
The people closest to David Beverly, the NASA engineer shot to death in his space-center office last week, asked his friends and colleagues at a memorial service Wednesday to share in his passions for work, play and family. Beverly, 62, was as much at home straddling a motorcycle on a cross-country trip or skippering his [...]
NASA managers decided Thursday to bring U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams back to Earth on an earlier shuttle flight than Her original return flight from the international space station was scheduled for late June, but a hail storm in February that damaged the space shuttle Atlantis’ fuel tank delayed the 2007 schedule by months. Atlantis, originally [...]
Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh will visit NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., on Tuesday, May 8. The tour of Goddard is occurring near the end of the queen’s visit to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia. Goddard is home to the largest organization of scientists [...]
Workers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, were back on the job Monday after a disgruntled contractor shot himself and one bystander. William Arthur Phillips, aged 60, entered Building 44 on the center’s sprawling campus on 20 April with a .38-calibre revolver and shot 62-year-old engineer David Beverly in the chest. Phillips was [...]
In January, the new Congress finally passed the budget for FY2007. The budget was based on the Continuing Resolution that had been in effect since last October, and so NASA was denied the increase over FY2006 that it had expected. In early February, the President proposed his budget for FY2008, and the screws on NASA [...]
The Rotary National Award for Space Achievement (RNASA) Foundation presented Apollo “Failure is Not An Option” Flight Director Eugene F. “Gene” Kranz with the prestigious 2007 National Space Trophy at their annual gala held April 20 at the Houston Hyatt Regency hotel. The award has been presented annually for the past 21 years to an [...]
Late this afternoon NASA announced that it was making a significant modification to the Orion development contract with Lockheed Martin. The announcement of the modification, at a total cost of $385 million, was formally released at 4:00 pm, after Wall Street had shut down for the day. The change in the contract will add two [...]
With only three years remaining before the space-shuttle fleet’s planned retirement, NASA managers have begun tackling the thorny issues that will dictate the program’s end. Critical facilities must be overhauled to support planned human missions to the moon. Billions of dollars’ worth of obsolete shuttle hardware must be disposed of. And, most difficult of all, [...]