spacetoday.net (and others) carried news at both extremes of the thrust spectrum today... the slowest rocket ever, SMART-1, has finally reached lunar orbit, 14 months after launch (it is now shifting to a more useful orbit for its instruments) using its Ion Drive... and the X-43A ScramJet project is making its final flight test run, expecting to ( Read more... )

Given comments seen elsewhere, I believe this
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Just for completeness: ST. LOUIS - The designers of the first privately manned rocket to burst into space were handed a $10 million check Saturday, a prize designed to encourage technology that will open the heavens to tourists.

I look forward to their next announcement (which will probably be either Virgin Galactic or GlobalFlyer related.)

I took a bunch of pictures of the
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Researchers writing today in Nature analyzed position measurements of two earlier satellites over an 11-year period, and determined that the 80-million-meter-long orbits of the satellites shifted by about two meters per year. Ignazio Ciufolini of the University of Lecce in Italy and Erricos Pavlis of the University of Maryland in Baltimore County ( Read more... )

I watched the 2nd x-prize-qualifying flight on the webcast again. The webcast was more heavily "produced" than before, but some of the backstory was interesting; it included particular gems like the aircraft id number of SS1 being a hack (N328KF standing for 328 KiloFeet, the target altitude ( Read more... )

Got up "early" this morning to watch the X-prize webcast of the Space Ship 1 mission. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to get out there for it, but the webcast apparently had better camera views than people on the ground did - they switched from White Night's camera to the SS1 Wing Camera right after launch, and had shots from a radar-tracking ( Read more... )

"On the 21 June, after Mike Melvill had gotten into the spaceship and we were doing the pre-flight checks, I climbed in and closed the door and made motions to go, and then they kicked me out" -- Burt Rutan, who says that while there won't be any passengers on Wednesday's flight, there may be one on the second flight - him.

If you've ever needed to explain what goes on during an eclipse, I think this picture of the Moon Shadow as seen from MIR (back in 1999) is one of the most helpful tools you could find... and it's a really cool picture :-)

Today's Wired article says:
"We have notified the X Prize organization that we'll make our first X Prize flight on Sept. 29 -- of this year," Rutan said. To win the prize, competitors must make two flights with a three-person craft to suborbital space -- 100 kilometers above the Earth -- in two weeks. Rutan said his team, officially dubbed American ( Read more... )