thequantumlife:

SpaceX successfully launched its (first) commercial rocket

SpaceX successfully launched its commercial rocket today marking the first time a private company has sent a spacecraft to the space station. The Falcon 9 rocket along with the Dragon capsule is loaded with the hopes and dreams of hundreds of students from around the USA.

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP), launched June 2010 by the National Center for Earth and Space ScienceEducation (NCESSE) in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC, is an important U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives students across a community the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station (ISS)—America’s newest National Laboratory.

The SpaceX Falcon/Dragon ship launch successfully marks a new era in commercial space transportation. It will deliver cargo, for now, and astronauts later, saving money for NASA and the government.

I’m gonna try to say this only one time, but fuck Elon Musk and SpaceX. If you think private spaceflight designed to line that douchebag’s pockets is a good thing, then you are high as a kite.

ifuckinglovespace:

Nature.com:

NASA aims for human rendezvous at Mars in 2033

It would be the most precious cargo since the Apollo astronauts returned Moon rocks to Earth. In 2033, humans would arrive in Mars orbit in order to pick up and return to Earth a canister containing the hopes and dreams of Mars scientists: a small collection of Mars rocks that would have been previously collected and put into orbit.

An internal NASA study group, tasked with replanning the agency’s beleaguered Mars programme, revealed on Tuesday that it was using this working scenario and date as a goal. The group has been tasked with finding ways of getting the human and robotic sides of NASA to work together more. In return for supplemental funds from the human programme and the technology office, the robotic science missions might, for instance, include experiments useful for the human programme, such as radiation detectors or optical communication demonstrations.

While the administration of President Barack Obama has said before that it would like to put humans in the vicinity of Mars by the early 2030s, this is the first articulation I’ve seen of a specific, shared date for the key goal of both the human and robotic sides. Orlando Figueroa, a former NASA official leading the study group, presented the working plans on Wednesday to a newly convened committeeof the National Academies responsible for astrobiology and planetary science.

Some of the committee members weren’t too thrilled to be wedded to the human programme. Some pointed out that the technological challenges in getting people to Mars are much greater — and much more expensive — than sending a robot. Such a long mission not only requires new rocketry to get there, but also new materials that would shield astronauts from the intense radiation that exists outside the comfortable environment of the Earth and its magnetosphere. Figueroa says that a robotic retrieval mission could be sent instead in 2033.

Figueroa also mentioned four possible scientific pathways that could define the new Mars programme. My distillation of them are as follows:

1) Proceed, as quickly as the budget allows, with the existing plans for the first stage of a Mars sample return mission: sending a rover to a specific site to identify and cache intriguing samples that would later be lifted into orbit and returned.

2) Do surface science at as many as three sites — increasing the time before samples are returned but increasing the probability that one of the sites has preserved life.

3) Shift away from the singled-minded focus on sample return and perform more generalized Mars “system science”, which could include atmospheric and interior investigations.

4) Consider the possibility that the Curiosity rover, due to land at Gale Crater in August, makes a breakthrough discovery that motivates an intense and immediate follow-up study.

Figueroa’s group is supposed to submit its final report to NASA later this summer.

Photo: This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light.

:)

FYI, pay attention to the Chair of the MPPG, Orlando Figueroa. He managed one of my company’s big contracts at GSFC while he worked there and has worked as a consultant on a few proposals we’ve bidded since he retired. He’s a damn genius, so it’ll be great to see what will come from him and the rest of the MPPG.

newsweek:

Super legit photography of the Enterprise Shuttle on its New York City fly-by earlier this morning. We spotted Eric Hwang (go visit his website!) on the 9th floor of IAC with a killer camera snapping away, so naturally asked if we could run some of his photos on the tumblr. Thanks Eric! These are great!!

Can’t quite explain it, but I find the positioning of the T-38 (or is it a F-5? shit, I’m not confident with the size of it in the picture. I’ll go with T-38) under the Enterprise and 747 in the top picture kinda hilarious.

jtotheizzoe:

A Final Flight for Enterprise

This morning, the space shuttle prototype Enterprise flew over NYC en route to her final resting place at the Intrepid Air & Space Museum on the Hudson River.

This wasn’t the first time Enterprise has flown over NYC. Up top, there she is in 1983 on the way back from the Paris Air Show. Below, today’s final flight over the Big Apple.

(pictures via @Brosner85 and NBCNews)

officialssay:

We apologize for the departure from our standard format, but a space shuttle just flew by our window and we thought you’d like to see. (Photo by Al Shaw)

<3

kennedycenter:

Today WE WERE the Kennedy Space Center (Washington, DC Annex). Here was the view from our Terrace as Space Shuttle Discovery flew over the Potomac toward its new hangar home at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles. 

More photos on Facebook.

ifuckinglovespace:

Space Shuttle Discovery at Dulles International Airport.

Here’s a far better picture from another coworker’s sister, who works as a photographer at Goddard.

P.S. This is your new background.

I may not have posted on here for quite a few months, but seeing Discovery’s final pass over GSFC on the way to DC and Dulles Airport moved me. Here’s a coworker’s picture.