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According to this reflectors are not sufficient to stop the harmful radiation.

This might lead to he building of growth chambers under a radiation shield comprised of regolith with light provided from collectors located on the surface. NASA-sponsored research has shown that low power LEDs (light emitting diodes) could find applicability as a low power option for illuminating Martian crops.

A little research into your theories before posting might be in order.

Also on the PSLV-C20 launch are the Canadian military satellite SAPPHIRE, and the twin spacecraft BRITE-Austria and UniBRITE, developed in Canada for TU Graz and University of Vienna respectively. ISRO put out a pretty good brochure describing the launch.

You can find some good photos of the stacking and launch vehicle integration here, here, and here. You can watch the launch live on Monday morning here.

Needless to say, we're all pretty stoked around here ^__^

The methane is believed to come from geological processes and not from life.

"Because this system is so close to us, it appears to move quite rapidly in the sky," says Dr. Volk. "We were able to confirm our detection--and rule out a more distant background object--within a few weeks since we could detect the motion of the system relative to the background stars relatively quickly."

[Purpose of Nanosputnik is to support development of satellite control techniques, monitoring of satellite operations, and research on new attitude system sensors and other components.]

Also, space.com has an article mentioning it.

I'm surprised there isn't more coverage. It is a little reminiscent of the latter days of the Apollo program when there was little/no coverage on the press, or to a greater extent the latter days of SpaceLab.

-F

But private enterprise won't even bother if there's not a bottom line.

I'm not sure I'm completely agree. The way I see it, there's going to be three different types of space endeavours in the future:

* Government-run: Pretty much mostly what we have now. Governments sending things up for science, prestige, and military purposes.

* Private for-profit (commercial): Right now this is mostly satellites, but should expand to things like space tourism, mining, orbital power satellites, shipment, manufacturing, space porn, etc.

* Private non-profit (altruism): This is the one which everyone seems to overlook, mostly because it really hasn't been done so far. These are done for prestige, to attract more donations, to assure a place in history, to advance mankind, to pad one's ego, etc.

This last one I think has a lot of potential. The best near-term examples is the Planetary Society's Cosmos I, which will launch the first solar sail spacecraft lin April of this year. It'll also be the first-ever space mission by a non-profit group (I think).

Another example I often cite is Elon Musk, who had a "Mars Oasis" project for launching an experimental greenhouse on the surface of Mars. There wouldn't be any direct payback from this -- just an entry in the history books and the knowledge that he'd advanced mankind. However he put this on hold when he did a thorough analysis and found that launch costs would be the dominant part of the price tag. Instead, he's invested his efforts in SpaceX; hopefully once he gets launch costs down he'll return to the Mars Oasis project.

Well, Nasa has stopped their ISS crew rescue vehicle program last year for cost reasons. See here .

Thanks for the info. I found some additional information . There was some talk of using this gold-plated mini-shuttle as the rescue vehicle. Then this design was being worked on. Even though its budget was, as Lars pointed out, cut for 2002, they still test launched it as recently as December 2001. This link has some info on the use of the Soyuz as the rescue vehicle.

I hadn't realized that US budget decisions had cut the ISS back to a skeleton crew. Here is a press release from a US Senator commenting on a recently released independent review of the Space Station's Science programs.

It was heard about here in a conference announcement from Marc Garneau and discussed on Slashdot.
And recently, it was pointed out that Canada does have critical exploration technology for drilling for samples.

Actually the entire NASA Budget for the last two years has been just under $15B with a full $15B budgeted for FY2003.

If you we take the US Census Bureau as an authority then the current US Population is about 286.5 Million.

$15,000,000,000 / 286,500,000 = $52.36, or almost exactly $1/week per American.

Plus, I find these statistics of cost per American pretty irrelevant, since the poorest 20% of Americans don't pay income tax and therefore are contributing nothing to run NASA. On the other hand, the Bush tax cuts passed last year by repealing the inheritance tax gave Bill Gates a $30B tax cut, enough to pay NASA's whole budget for two straight years!