Author: ChrisDMarshall

  • More Delays

    Last year Russia suffered from the lose of a Progress vehicle that resulted in several delays to manned launches and the possibility of having to de-man the Space Station which has been constantly occupied since November 2000. Thankfully they were able to resolve the problems and the station returned to a full crew before the…

  • Latest News from ISS

    Today Mike Suffredini, the Manager of the International Space Station made several announcements today during a teleconference aired live on NASA’s web site.  Here is a summary of them. Computer Hardware/Software Upgrade Mike confirmed today that they had just completed a comprehensive upgrade of the Computer Software and Hardware used to control the space station…

  • Pale Blue Dot

    This week during the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society a number of announcements were made about recent discoveries, today we will take a looks at some of these. One of the most significant is the announcement that almost every star in the galaxy has at least one planet orbiting it. Recently we discussed…

  • Active NASA missions

    As we close out another year we are going to take a look at some of the other NASA missions that are active in the Solar System exploring other planets.  While the future looks a little uncertain at the moment due to the growing budget crisis there are plenty of spacecraft still in operation. Voyager…

  • And then there were six

    This morning Oleg Kononenko, Andre Kuipers and Don Pettit successfully launched from Kazakhstan aboard their Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft heading to the space station to complete the full Expedition 30 crew and once again return the station to a six man crew. Despite the bitter cold weather, the crew launched on time and will now spend two days…

  • NASA Discovers First Earth-size Planets

    Two weeks ago NASA announced the first planet is the habitable zone of another star.  Yesterday they announced the discovery of the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone but they are the smallest exoplanets…

  • Stratolaunch Systems

    Today we return to our commercial space series as we look at a new player to the field. Paul G. Allen and Burt Rutan announced yesterday that they were once again partnering to revolutionize the space launch industry.  Their last adventure led to the Ansari X Prize winning SpaceShipOne craft which achieved three sub-orbital flights…

  • Kepler – A Search for Habitable Planets

    This week the Kepler mission confirmed its First Planet in Habitable Zone of a Sun-like Star, they increased the number of planet candidates to 2365, they celebrated 1000 days in space and finally held their first science conference.  Today we take a look at the Kepler mission and what it has discovered so far. The…

  • Falling Behind

    China are on the verge of surpassing the US for second place in the number of spacecraft launched in a single year.  Last year we were tied for second place and so far this year have one more mission than China but with no more planned US launches this year and at least one more…

  • The History of Mars Exploration (NASA)

    To follow up the successful launch of MSL, which NASA confirmed last night was inserted into an almost perfect trajectory towards Mars, today we take a look at the history of successful Mars Exploration missions by NASA. The History of Mars Exploration Year Name Type Summary 1964 Mariner 4 Flyby First spacecraft to flyby of…