"XCOR Aerospace is a private California-based company that has developed the Lynx, a reusable launch vehicle that has suborbital flight capabilities. Low-speed test flights are expected to commence later this year, with incremental testing to take place over the following months."

"The J-2X engine is the first new liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen rocket engine developed in 40 years that will be rated to carry humans into space. "

"Most Profitable: 253 Mathilde, a 52.8 km-diameter C-type (carbonaceous) asteroid that has an estimated value of over $100 trillion and estimated profit of $9.53 trillion (USD) "

"SpaceX and Bigelow Aerospace have announced a new marketing alliance for SpaceX transportation to Bigelow private space stations. SpaceX will take customers, both private and governmental, to orbit using its Dragon reusable space capsule; Bigelow will host them using its BA330 inflatable space habitats, which will presumably be launched on a larger rocket.  No announcement was made concerning who would carry the stations themselves to orbit."

"Algol, aka the Demon Star, is actually a binary star in the Perseus constellation, and has been the subject of speculation for hundreds of years. Now a group of Finnish researchers propose that the peculiar behavior of Algol was first noted by the Egyptians some 3200 years ago."

"Winglee and his students continue research in his Johnson Hall laboratory on the possibility of placing mag-beam units in orbit around Earth and around a planet such as Mars that humans might want to explore. With a unit on each end – one to give a spacecraft a high-velocity push on its journey and the other to slow it at its destination – a mission to Mars could be accomplished in as little as 90 days, rather than the 2.5 years it would take with conventional means."

Since the launch involved a classified cargo for the National Reconnaissance Office, no details were immediately available about whether it was boosted to its intended orbit.

"It comes from the region surrounding the galactic centre and looks like a form of energy called synchrotron emission"

" Remote Sensing is a technology for sampling electromagnetic radiation comprising a signal emanating from its source target that is used to acquire and interpret non-contiguous geospatial data from which to extract information about features, objects, and classes on the Earth's land surface, oceans, and atmosphere (and, where applicable, on the exteriors of other bodies in the Solar System, or, in the broadest framework, celestial bodies such as stars and galaxies)."

"With a weight that rivals a baby elephant, a meteorite that fell from space some 30,000 years ago is likely Britain’s largest space rock. And after much sleuthing, researchers think they know where it came from and how it survived so long without weathering away."

The American space agency looks set to pull the plug on its joint missions to Mars with the European Space Agency... budget woes..."

"Highly-tilted worlds would have extreme seasons, subjecting life to alternating periods of scorching and subzero temperatures. This could make the development of all but hardiest, simplest creatures a long shot."

"Have you ever you looked up at the bright, cavernous Aristarchus Crater on the Moon through a telescope or binoculars and wondered what it would be like to stand on the rim and peer inside? Spectacular new views from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is almost as good as being there, and a new video lets you “rappel” down and take a closer look at the west side of the crater walls."

"When NASA's Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around giant asteroid Vesta in July, scientists fully expected the probe to reveal some surprising sights. But no one expected a 13-mile high mountain, two and a half times higher than Mount Everest, to be one of them."

"planetary ecosynthesis" - nice term. Also, I believe the answer is Yes.

COMET HARPOON GUN

Images taken from orbit reveal thousands of peculiar depressions at a variety of longitudes and latitudes, ranging in size from 60 feet to over a mile across and 60 to 120 feet deep. No one knows how they got there.

Raw, unprocessed images from the successful Oct. 19 flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus by NASA's Cassini spacecraft provide new views of the moon and the icy jets that burst from its southern polar region.

A new image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows a mountain three times as high as Mt. Everest, amidst the topography in the south polar region of the giant asteroid Vesta.

""Everything in aerospace always takes longer that you originally think," he said."

"Global and high resolution mapping of Enceladus confirms that the weather forecast for Saturn's unique icy moon is set for ongoing snow flurries. The superfine ice crystals that coat Enceladus's surface would make perfect powder for skiing, according to Dr Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute"

"“Like all works in the Escape Vehicles series no.1 [1996] and no.2 [1997] are tinged with the melancholy of failure. "

"Extremely high levels of supersaturation were found on Mars, up to 10 times greater than those found on Earth. Clearly, there is much more water vapour in the upper Martian atmosphere than anyone ever imagined."

"A rocket carrying China's first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, has launched from the north of the country. Tiangong means "heavenly palace" in Chinese."

"The US company SpaceX is working on the first-ever reusable rocket to launch to space and back, with the goal of one day helping humans colonize Mars, founder Elon Musk said Thursday."

"A new study published on arXiv.org shows that, based on computer simulations, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune may not have been the only gas giants in our solar system. According to David Nesvorny from Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute, our current solar system could never have happened without the existence of a fifth planet."

Astronomers say they have found a second planet outside our solar system which is the right distance from its star to potentially support life. But any possible inhabitants would have to have a taste for an environment that felt like a hot steam bath.

A blazar is a galaxy which, like a quasar, has an intensely bright central nucleus containing a supermassive black hole. In a blazar, however, the emitted light sometimes includes extremely high energy gamma rays, sometimes over a hundred million times more energetic than the highest energy X-rays that the Chandra X-ray Observatory can study.

Lineweaver and Egan propose that it is unlikely that any intelligent life could have evolved in the universe much earlier than now (give or take a couple of billion years) since you need to progressively cycle through the star formation and destruction of Population III, II and then I stars to fill the universe with sufficient ‘metals’ to allow planets with evolutionary ecosystems to develop.

in the shadow of Saturn

Alberto Fairуn, an astrobiologist who works for both the SETI Institute (the group using radio telescopes to listen for extraterrestrial life) and NASA’s Ames research center, along with colleagues, has published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, in which they describe ancient Mars as cold and wet with a large northern hemispheric ocean whose edges were lined with glaciers.

The distant region beyond Saturn is too cold for liquid water, a necessity for life as we know it. But new research indicates that rocky planets far from their parent star could generate enough heat to keep water flowing - if their atmospheres were made up primarily of hydrogen.

Russia on Tuesday grounded its workhorse Proton-M rockets after the latest in a string of launch mishaps put a prized telecommunications satellite into the wrong orbit.

Reanalyzing the problem using string theory techniques used in the past to analyze black holes reveals a range of wormhole diameter-to-energy ratios that appear stable.

The space lab, named “Tiangong” translates from Mandarin Chinese into English as “Heavenly Palace”.  Weighing just under 9 tons, the prototype module will orbit for two years. China will use the module to practice docking maneuvers and test orbital technologies during the module’s lifetime.

Plumes of chemicals will cost $96 million to clean up in the next 30 years, including $6 million this year.

"Once on the surface, the DREAMS (Dust characterisation, Risk assessment, and Environment Analyser on the Martian Surface) scientific payload will function as an environmental station for the two to four days of the surface mission." TWO TO FOUR DAYS. How utterly fucking embarrassing. That's the best we'll have in 2016. A demonstration article that is intended to work for two to four days. I should have a fucking homestead on Mars by now.

"A new computer model of the solar system based on data from the Voyager space probe indicates that the edge of the solar system is not smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles."

"The footage in this little film was captured by the hardworking men and women at NASA with the Cassini Imaging Science System." This is amazing. There's the germs of whole new aesthetics in here. (crossref: video glitch)

Copenhagen Suborbitals hopes to launch the world’s first amateur-built rocket for human space travel and have announced an upcoming launch window for their Tycho Brahe capsule.

AFTER THIRTY YEARS! "The Skylon, which is being developed at the Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines in the UK, is an unpiloted and reusable spacecraft that can launch into Low Earth Orbit after taking off from a conventional runway."

"The fourth of Europe's robot freighters, due to be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in early 2013, has been named after Albert Einstein, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday."

"The Titan Mare Explorer, or TiME, would perform the first direct inspection of an ocean environment beyond Earth by landing in, and floating on, a large methane-ethane sea on the cloudy, complex moon."

"Oddities in the rotation of Saturn's largest moon Titan might add to growing evidence that it harbors an underground ocean, researchers suggest."

"From the fashionable worlds of Christian Dior and Playtex to the military-industrial complex working overtime on efforts to create a protective suit for U.S. exploration of the moon, and from early computerized analyses of urban management to an "android" history of the French court, all by way of long chapters on the experimental high-flyers and military theorists who collaborated to push human beings further and further above the weather—and eventually off the planet itself—de Monchaux's book shows the often shocking juxtapositions that give such rich texture and detail to the invention of the spacesuit: pressurized clothing for human survival in space."

"The biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, using light from 14,000 quasars – supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies billions of light years away – has been constructed by scientists with the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey"

"The heliosheath is a very strange place, filled with a magnetic froth no spacecraft has ever encountered before, echoing with low-frequency radio bursts heard only in the outer reaches of the solar system, so far from home that the sun is a mere pinprick of light..."

"A handful of companies competing to make the spaceship to replace the iconic US shuttle said Thursday they are racing to shrink what will be a long gap in flying Americans into space aboard US craft."

"Subaru Telescope research team led by Dr. Masatoshi Imanishi at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan sampled many infrared bright, merging galaxies and determined the presence of active supermassive black holes (SMBH) deeply buried in their centers."

"Enceladus is linked to Saturn with a giant beam of electrons that flow back and fourth between the planet and moon."

"Jack O'Malley-James of the University of St Andrews has studied what plants might be like on an Earth-like planet with two or three suns and found that they may appear black or grey.  He will be presenting results at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno on Tuesday 19th April"

"The discovery of stable orbits inside certain kinds of black hole implies that planets and perhaps even life could survive inside these weird objects, says one cosmologist"

"...powerful beams of neutrinos could be used to turn entire stars into flashing beacons, broadcasting information across the galaxy. Outlandish as this sounds, it is an idea that can easily be checked, for astronomers are already sitting on the data that might contain these extraterrestrial messages. They just need to analyse those data from a new perspective."

"When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on -- until now."

"The graceful dance between three stars seen by the Kepler telescope has drawn the attention of astronomers because it is not accompanied by a song."

"The search for alien life usually focuses on planets around other stars. But a lesser-known possibility is that life has sprung up on planets that somehow were ejected from their original solar systems and became free-floating in the universe, as well as on small bodies called sub-brown dwarfs, which are stars so small and dim they are not really stars at all, but function more like planets."

"In order to look at trimming costs when it comes to rockets, researchers in Japan are looking to create a ‘smart’ rocket. With the use of artificial intelligence, they hope to create a rocket that can diagnose, and in some cases even repair, its own system malfunctions."

"Set in the deserted grounds of Paypal founder Elon Musk’s Space X jet lab in Hawthorne, California, the film was inspired by the pioneering spirit of the space race, which, according to Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy, “has defined generations of artists in their desire to use new mediums and question the established rules they were taught to follow.” This cinematic collision between rocket science and visual daring is an apt match for Rodarte’s spring 2010 collection—a symphony of flesh-colored crochet knits, fluorescent fibres, leather bandages and distressed plaid. Costumed in a series of these exquisite creations, Van Seenus blurrily emerges from a shimmering seascape before running through the starkly alluring spaces of the Space X facility... Van Seenus’ hallucinatory journey, punctuated by glimpses of mysterious experiments and sudden rocket blasts, is chillingly soundtracked by LA noise-merchants No Age."

"At a joint press conference with Virgin Galactic at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference on Monday, Astronauts for Hire Inc. announced the selection of its third class of commercial scientist-astronaut candidates to conduct experiments on suborbital flights."

"The Sun has unleashed its strongest flare in four years, observers say." Because it's my birthday.

"A group of Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives is proposing to shift funds from NASA’s climate-change research coffers to the agency’s manned spaceflight program, an effort they say could preserve what they described as the agency’s core mission even as the new GOP-controlled House seeks to make good on vows to roll back federal discretionary spending this year"

"There were also 4 models of “Buran” spaceship. One of them still rests in Baikonur cosmodrome. In the 1990s it was used by local youth for drinking sessions, so some windows are broken and its general condition is very poor."

"For years researchers have been debating whether Enceladus, a tiny moon floating just outside Saturn's rings, is home to a vast underground ocean. Is it wet--or not? Now, new evidence is tipping the scales. Not only does Enceladus likely have an ocean, that ocean is probably fizzy like a soft drink and could be friendly to microbial life..."

"...engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., confirmed that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite ejected from Fast Affordable Scientific and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT. The ejection event occurred spontaneously and was identified this morning when engineers at the center analyzed onboard FASTSAT telemetry. The ejection of NanoSail-D also has been confirmed by ground-based satellite tracking assets..."