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Get some convincing shots of a "global killer" that's "20 years out" and lots of geeks saying it's a "99% guarantee to hit the planet" and you'd get your funding real quick.

Like this one, or like that one which came close but might had his orbit perturbed enough to come closer some time in the future ?

Then, when it "misses" (because it wasn't there) and the geeks say "oh, this was an imperial unit asteroid, we were doing the calcs in metric. Our bad. But look, we got cool space ships!

Sorry, but I fail to see why you need to give an explanation why the meteorite only came closely by instead of hitting earth ?
I mean : You're the country who started a war against another based on weapons of mass destruction that didn't even exist in the first place ? And you think you need to provide complex metric-vs-imperial based excuses ? Or the actually "shrinking probability cone" explanations ?!?
At worst, you could explain them the keyhole phenomenon and buy an additionnal decade of funding.

Well, I suppose it's a slightly different technique than the one demonstrated last year... maybe this APP thingy will show us dimmer exoplanets or something.

The second article is about John Singleton and the polarization synchrotron. Unfortunately that article, which has been regurgitated all over the net gets WAY ahead of itself. I wasn't able to find out whether Singleton actually claimed faster than light data transmission while talking to that reporter (I very much doubt it) or if the reporter made it up, but no such thing was demonstrated.

This article is about the same thing and Singleton specifically says that special relativity is not violated, which means no information could be transmitted faster than light. The description of what's going on also makes it clear that the effect is very similar to the "waving a laser at the moon" example (used by Singleton himself), which does not involve any information transmission.

The speed of light in a vacuum (yes, when people say "the speed of light" in this context they mean in a vacuum) isn't the sacred thing. Nor is relativity. The real sacred principle is causality which, like the conservation of energy, has never been observed to be violated and would lead to all kinds of weird stuff if it ever were.

Maybe someone will one day figure out how to transmit a signal faster than light. At present no one has even described theoretically how it might reasonably be done.

You say you're not a physicist. May I suggest you take a bit more humble approach when criticizing actual physicists? Oh, and don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

If you want to hear more stories about space missions, particularly cutting edge ones, check out some of the following sites:

Spaceflightnow.com
Space.com
The Space Fellowship
The Planetary Society

and, of course,

JAXA
NASA
JPL

There are other sites, but those are some of my favorite.

Right, but these are guys that have never delivered before.

Huh? Boeing's been operating the Delta rocket family since 1960, with over 300 orbital rockets launched. The United Launch Alliance has just announced that they've launched 36 consecutive successful missions in 36 months. Never delivered before, you say?

As of now the solar cells are producing energy with 14.9 percent efficiency, which is pretty great compared to off-the-shelf commercial modules which range from 13 to 20 percent.

I guess that must be good for the size, but Boeing announced 41.6 percent efficient cells this year and I wonder how the ex NASA employee & inventor of the super soaker is getting on with his work he claims could hit up to 60%

Yeah I was a bit intrigued by this myself. The entire article discusses a new heavy lift vehicle, but has absolutely no specifications or details. Is it liquid, solid, or hybrid? Will it be developed in-house by NASA or contracted out? What exactly do they mean by 'simpler?'

I checked Spaceflightnow, SpaceFellowship, and ParabolicArc and couldn't find anything but a parent of the original ScienceInsider article. Google doesn't reveal a whole lot at cursory glance either. Hell I don't even see anything on NASA's own website. If anyone digs up some particulars, please post some links, I would be very interested in seeing them.

Also, offtopic, but for those who say Slashdot is behind the news release cycle and doesn't post breaking news, considering it just posted a story that 4 other space news websites haven't picked up yet, I'd say you've just been proven wrong =P

VASIMR can fire for up to 10 minutes at 200 kW using trickle charged batteries.

http://spacefellowship.com/2008/12/13/nasa-and-ad-astra-rocket-company-sign-agreement-for-flight-test-of-the-vasimr-rocket-engine-aboard-the-international-space-station/

I'm not using them to justify the "entire" program. I picked one accomplishment out of many to highlight.

With the exception of studying the effect of microgravity on humans themselves, I can't think of a single science program using the Shuttle that couldn't have been done better, cheaper, and more reliably with unmanned rockets. That includes HST, which was only put in low-earth orbit to give the Shuttle something to do. (See, for example, this paper). The Air Force realized this long ago with respect to military payloads, and quit using the Shuttle early on, and NASA has abandoned the idea of a serviceable telescope in low-earth orbit when launching the Webb, which will be at L2.

The shuttle as originally envisaged in the 70's would have been fully reusable and capable of reaching geostationary orbit. That would have been worth the time and effort. What we have was a waste of money, doing a job that is done better (and far cheaper) by Soyuz. The ISS is even worse. The effects of microgravity on people were studied to death by the Russians on MIR. The ISS hasn't really done much of any new science at all, which is tragic when you consider all of the actual cutting-edge space science that could have been done with the ISS budget.

Do you honestly believe that the whole shuttle and ISS program is nothing more than a PR campaign?

Pretty much. The science return for the expense has been incredibly low. We have been "exploring" low-earth orbit for forty years now. There's not much more to find.

I'm so happy for AA I am going to fly onto my roof and dance nekkid till I get arrested. OH, and for those who may need a chuckle, I present this forum @ Space Fellowship. Arrogance, conceit, mis-understood genius, and more ! Troll heaven abounds ! http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=10511

Try This:
http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/forum-23.html

I don't know how they plan to get this to the ISS, but Ad Astra and NASA agreed to test VASIMR ion engine at ISS. Assuming they can resupply the engine, and the engine parts designed life is sufficient, even this test article could work to keep ISS on station for quite a while. The Russian resupply vehicles (Progress) periodically boost the station, too.

Seriously, if they have this down and working, could this be used on the moon?

I'm pretty sure it's on their mind, especially since they won part of the Northrop Grumman/NASA Lunar Lander Challenge and anticipate winning the rest this year. Since it uses methane as its fuel, I imagine the system could also be quite handy for a Martian sample return or human mission, as you could harvest methane from the Martian atmosphere.

A copy of a post by one of the Armadillo team members from this weekend:

http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=38466#p38466

Still very much in the game. In the past week, we've done three free flights with the Methane mod for the NASA contract. Tuesday night was just to make sure everything was A-OK for Saturday's flight, which was in front of a bunch of NASA people and other folks. Both of those were "LLC-style" hops where the mod flies gently up to about 55 meters and then gently back down.

Since both of those went well, we decided to do a "boosted hop," where instead of gently flying up and down, it goes full throttle for about three seconds, coasts to apogee at low throttle, falls quickly back down and then throttles up before touching down (this will be more like the flight profiles of the higher and higher altitude testing we're close to beginning). That flight went well too, except that in order to make sure to stay below the restrictions in the waiver for those flights, we put less pressure in the boosted-hop flight just to play it conservatively, and as a result it didn't go as high as we thought it might (only about 45 meters instead of twice that).

Also, we've already internally decided on a date when we'll attempt LLC level 2; not sure when that gets publically announced. That will be with the high-pressure augmented Mod that we've been calling the Super Mod, not the Methane Mod.

Oh, and alas... even though I say "we" in the above commentary, I was too busy at my "day job" so I missed ALL of the three free flights this week. So, I don't know what we'll have by way of video to show. I know Phil tried his best to capture some, but with all the other things he also had to worry about, I know the coverage will be limited.

From a post by Matthew Ross: http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=38466#p38466

"Both of those were "LLC-style" hops where the mod flies gently up to about 55 meters and then gently back down.
Since both of those went well, we decided to do a "boosted hop," where instead of gently flying up and down, it goes full throttle for about three seconds, coasts to apogee at low throttle, falls quickly back down and then throttles up before touching down"

A 5 second serch on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_loop

"A closed-loop control system is one in which an input forcing function is determined in part by the system response. The measured response of a physical system is compared with a desired response. The difference between these two responses initiates actions that will result in the actual response of the system to approach the desired response."

So, engine generates thrust X, desired target of which is X+Y. Throttle is increased until measured response is X+Y. At which point the throttle is maintained or decreased, depending on what part of the flight profile the vehicle is in.

From the Space Fellowship forum page: http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=396&start=1710

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_rqVBhwx6I

Also on the SF page, a bit of commentary from Matthew Ross, including that they've internally decided on a date for LLC 2.

-malloc

Sure, SpaceX is behind the schedule with the Falcon 9 and recently lost a customer ( http://spacefellowship.com/2009/07/13/spacex-lost-falcon-9-customer/ ). But if we look on the bright side, what SpaceX have accomplished so far, took two superpowers and a brewing cold war last time, for example the Merlin engine is the first new engine designed in the US since the 60's , they have launched Falcon 1 successfully recently ( http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20090715 ) and pushes forward with the Dragon spacecraft ( http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php ). I think all this speaks volume about private space flight and the very important role that X-Prize and such plays.

i don't know the exact details, but apparently others have given it some thought and seem to have arrived at various solutions to the problem.

"It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way. A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Pegasus launches succeeded; 3 of 5 for Ariane; 9 of 20 for Atlas; 9 of 21 for Soyuz; and 9 of 18 for Proton." - Elon Musk, 26 March 2006

Elon Musk's brother Kimbal has a page with a little info here http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/

There is some discussion here http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/about5898.html

Spacefellowship.com also has a discussion area for Armadillo Aerospace where actual members of the team and even John Carmack sometimes respond to posts.

Where else do people go to discuss SpaceX?

Please join me in begging SpaceX to seed a torrent of their broadcast quality video of the launch. Mod me up to +5 so someone there will be more likely to see this plea.

Beginning with a PhD from Caltech, he was a systems engineer on the NASA Mars Scout, Mars Surveyor, Mars Sample Return and various Discovery Missions. [...] He was the Principal Scientist for Orbital Sciences Corporation, Project Leader for the BlastOff Lunar Lander project with Jim Cameron and AeroAstro's miniature spacecraft project. He has managed and completed projects for NASA, the US Air Force Research Lab, Microcosm Incorporated, and SpaceX Corporation. Until recently, he held the position of lead engineer for Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins Crew Capsule.

Our Program Manager is Tomas Svitek, who has a PhD from Caltech, was a systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the NASA Mars Scout, Mars Surveyor, Mars Sample Return and various Discovery Missions. He was the Principal Scientist for Orbital Sciences Corp., Project Leader for the BlastOff Lunar Lander project and AeroAstro's miniature spacecraft project. He has managed and completed projects for NASA, the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, Microcosm Inc., and SpaceX Corp.. He was lead engineer for Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins crew capsule and has long run his own space consulting company in California.

For that reason any launch to orbit will cost at least $30-50 million, and the most expensive ride to orbit -- currently the Space Shuttle -- comes in at about $500 million. That is not all that large a range, and suggests launch costs are not totally dominated by the size of what's launched.

Some folks have been speculating that it might be possible to use a $6 million SpaceX Falcon 1 to get 213kg of mass to the moon. Of course, you still have to worry about landing that mass and the rover itself, which may or may not be feasible. Another possibility is a $11 million Russian Dnepr rocket.

Kistler failed to gather the commitments for private funding within the mutually-agreed period of time.

this link has some info and cool pictures.

Mr. Atlas launching Mr. Satellite. http://spacefellowship.com/News/?p=3929

Sorry, you are not cleared for further information.

You can find more technical details about the launch on the space fellowship: http://www.spacefellowship.com/News/?p=1614

We can expect video's and pictures, of the "living" annimals etc!

It wasn't that extreme although the risks tend to get exaggerated to provide a margin of safety. But there's been quite the "Chicken Little" attitude about lately for some reason. Possibly because there's been so much interest focused on private space launches due to the X-prize and such. NASA's official stance has actually been along the lines that the risk was of developing cancer before they died and it was actually quite a bit less for somebody travelling to Mars than for someone who smoked cigarettes. The biggest problem is that until we actually GO there we really won't KNOW and can only SPECULATE about the risks....
Here's a few links with some info:
http://hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=162 0
http://www.spacefellowship.com/Forum/about1155-0-a sc-60.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/rel eases/2003/03-183.html