Spacecraft

During the night, Japan broke the record for the smallest rocket to orbit a satellite. They modified a two-stage suborbital sounding rocket by adding a third stage and a guidance system, and put a 6 lb. cubesat into orbit. (The previous record was also held by Japan, in 1970.)

Here is an article about it:
https://preview.tinyurl.com/yao28s3c

And the launch video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeW-Qqu9-8U

…John Herschel Glenn Jr. (July 18, 1921 – December 8, 2016) was an American aviator, engineer, astronaut, and United States Senator from Ohio. In 1962 he became the first American to orbit the earth, circling three times. Before joining NASA, he was a distinguished fighter pilot in both World War II and Korea, with five Distinguished Flying Crosses and eighteen clusters.

He was one of the "Mercury Seven" group of military test pilots selected in 1959 by NASA to become America's first astronauts. On February 20, 1962, Glenn flew the Friendship 7 mission and became the first American to orbit the Earth and the fifth person in space. Glenn received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1978, and was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1990. Glenn was the last surviving member of the Mercury Seven after the death of Scott Carpenter.…

…more than eight thousand awesome, never-before seen pictures of the Apollo missions to the moon.…

Astronauts would ascend 12 miles into the stratosphere before taking off under new plans to build a space lift… “From the top of the tower, space planes will launch in a single stage to orbit, returning to the top of the tower for refuelling and reflight.” …

The European Space Agency says the comet lander Philae has come back to life after hibernating for seven months. It is the first communication with the probe since it landed in November.…

NASA launched four identical spacecraft Thursday on a billion-dollar mission to study the explosive give-and-take of the Earth and sun's magnetic fields.

…quartet of observatories is being placed into an oblong orbit stretching tens of thousands of miles into the magnetosphere - nearly halfway to the moon at one point. They will fly in pyramid formation, between 6 miles and 250 miles apart, to provide 3-D views of magnetic reconnection on the smallest of scales.

Magnetic reconnection is what happens when magnetic fields like those around Earth and the sun come together, break apart, then come together again, releasing vast energy. This repeated process drives the aurora, as well as solar storms that can disrupt communications and power on Earth. …

The interstellar spacecraft builds on previous designs that thoeretically allow distant travel by bending space-time… Called IXS Enterprise… Alcubierre's theory was published in 1994 and involved enormous amounts of energy being used to expand and contract space itself - thereby generating a 'warp bubble' in which a spacecraft would travel. Allowing space and time to act as the propellant by pulling the craft through the bubble would be like stepping on an escalator….

An unmanned Russian cargo ship carrying tons of supplies for astronauts on the International Space Station suffered a major malfunction after launching today and ultimately crashed back to Eart ... Ship was hauling 2.9 tons of food, fuel and supplies to space station; 2nd Russian spacecraft to be lost during launch in six days

Today the Space Shuttle Atlantis took off for the last time, as Obama has scrapped our space program in favor of using NASA to "make muslims feel good" and America will now have to hitch rides with Russia, which will now control the International Space Station. It is a sad day.

...stuck with an 800-pound pump in his hands for nearly a half-hour... Good thing it was weightless.... "I'm fine as long as it's not too much longer," Bowen radioed. "How much longer?"... perched on a small platform at the end of the 58-foot robotic arm... [All part of the job....]

The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, according to new research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson broke ground on Friday on construction of Spaceport America, the world's first facility built specifically for space-bound commercial customers and fee-paying passengers.

We aren't really at the point yet where we can send human beings to Mars. The first and most important reason for that hesitation is our track record -- different nations have sent more than 30 probes toward Mars, but fewer than one-third of those probes have survived the trip. It's not a very good track record, and certainly not one that would encourage us to replace those robotic probes with human beings, at least until we've improved the odds of success.