17 March 2011
Launch of new ISS mission slated for April 5
MORE...

17 March 2011
NASA spacecraft is first to orbit Mercury
A NASA spacecraft began orbiting Mercury Thursday, becoming the first to fly around the solar system's innermost planet, the space agency said.
MORE...

17 March 2011
GOP Lawmakers Appeal for Manned Exploration Funds
Two Republican lawmakers appealed to House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to spare NASA’s manned space exploration programs from the budget axe next year while suggesting the agency’s roughly $1.6 billion request for climate-monitoring initiatives is ripe for cuts.
MORE...

17 March 2011
Academy Award Winner James Cameron Joins X PRIZE Foundation Board of Trustees
The X PRIZE Foundation today announced the appointment of James Cameron to its Board of Trustees. Cameron joins a world-class Board of Trustees that includes a growing list of entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers such as Dean Kamen, inventor, CEO, DEKA; Dr. J. Craig Venter, CEO, Synthetic Genomics; Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla and CEO, SpaceX; Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author; Anousheh Ansari, first female private space explorer; Larry Page, CEO & co-founder, Google; and Arianna Huffington, President and Editor in Chief, Huffington Post Media Group. The Board actively participates by advising on where large incentive competitions (X PRIZEs and X CHALLENGEs) can drive radical breakthroughs to help address humanity's grand challenges.
MORE...

16 March 2011
UK Space Agency Champions Adaptation Of Space Technology For Terrestrial Uses
The UK Space Agency is making available a total of Pounds 700k to fund proposals to develop technology from Europe's Aurora programme into terrestrial applications that can benefit society and the UK economy.
MORE...

16 March 2011
U.S. Lawmakers Question NASA’s Commitment to Heavy-Lift
During a March 15 hearing, the committee’s top Republican, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, criticized the 2012 budget plan President Barack Obama sent lawmakers Feb. 14, saying it ignores congressional direction in the NASA Authorization Act of 2010 that pared back the administration’s commercial space transportation and technology efforts in favor of rapidly developing a national launch capability needed for manned space missions.
MORE...

15 March 2011
USA Engineer Dies from Shuttle Launch Pad Fall
MORE...

15 March 2011
US, Russia sign deal to transport astronauts until 2016
The Russian agency said the two sides had signed a contract for Russia to transport 12 astronauts on its Soyuz spacecraft in the period between 2014-2016. NASA put the value of the contract at $753 million.
MORE...

14 March 2011
NASA Takes Over after Japan Evacuates ISS Control Center
MORE...

14 March 2011
NASA Unveiling New Rocket Integration Facility At Wallops
The Horizontal Integration Facility will support medium-class mission capabilities. The first customer to use the facility will be Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Va., with its Taurus II launch vehicle.
MORE...

14 March 2011
NASA Seeks Partners To Manage Night Rover, Nano-Sat Launcher Challenges
Teams competing in the Night Rover Challenge will need to demonstrate a solar-powered exploration vehicle that can operate in darkness, using its own stored energy. NASA is offering a prize purse of $1.5 million for the rover challenge. The Nano-Satellite Launcher Challenge is to place a small satellite into Earth orbit, twice in one week, with a prize purse of $2 million.
MORE...

14 March 2011
NASA books seats on Soyuz through 2015
NASA says it has signed a $753 million agreement with the Russian space agency Roscosmos for 12 round trips for astronauts to the International Space Station. The arrangement will let NASA fly a dozen U.S. or partner agency astronauts on Russia's venerable Soyuz spacecraft between 2014 and 2015 at a cost of about $62.7 million per seat, SPACE.com reported Monday. That's up from the $55.8 million per seat NASA paid for six upcoming round trips to the ISS in 2013 and 2014.
MORE...

14 March 2011
Houston To Name Avenue After Soviet Cosmonaut Gagarin
The Russkiy Mir foundation will next week name a park avenue in the U.S. city of Houston after the first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
MORE...

14 March 2011
Russia delays ISS launch for 'technical reasons'
Russia announced a delay Monday in the planned launch of three astronauts to the International Space Station on March 30 due to a technical problem with the spacecraft.
MORE...

11 March 2011
The Future For Space Missions
A new report from the National Research Council recommends a suite of planetary science flagship missions for the decade 2013-2022 that could provide a steady stream of important new discoveries about the Solar System. However, if NASA's budget over that decade cannot support all of these missions, the agency should preserve smaller scale missions in its New Frontiers and Discovery programs first and delay some or all of the recommended large-scale missions, the report says.
MORE...

11 March 2011
Testing Mars Missions In Morocco
A valley east of Morocco's Atlas Mountains has a profusion of red, black and tan rocks scattered about as far as the eye can see. The distant mountains on the horizon call to mind the walls of an ancient impact crater as photographed by the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Even the volcanic origin of many of the rocks here is similar to the geological history of Mars. The arid and varied Morocco landscape provides plenty of opportunities for scientists to test the limits of their instruments.
MORE...

09 March 2011
Planetary Society Statement On Planetary Science Decadal Survey For 2013-2022
The Planetary Science Decadal Survey committee faced a nearly impossible task: to set priorities for NASA's robotic exploration within a tight budget. They did a great job in laying out a plan for space missions over the next decade and reached consensus on their recommendations-no small achievement in itself.
MORE...

09 March 2011
US Shuttle Discovery makes historic last landing
MORE...

FOR FURTHER READING
15 March 2011
Time Is Now For Human Mission To Mars
"A One Way Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet," is a collection of articles published in book form this month by the Journal of Cosmology.
"The overall message of this volume is not just that going to Mars is a worthwhile scientific program and a great adventure worthy of Homo sapiens. It is that we can begin the project now," write the editors, astrobiologists Paul Davies of Arizona State University and Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University.
MORE...

14 March 2011
Getting down to the nuts and bolts of suborbital research
Interest is using the new generation of commercial suborbital vehicles for scientific research has surged in the last couple of years. Jeff Foust reports that, at a recent conference, the focus of the discussion had shifted to more practical matters like training and payload interfaces.
MORE...

14 March 2011
Soyuz landing tests new systems and old secrecy habits
Later this week a new variant of the Soyuz spacecraft will undock from the ISS and return to Earth. James Oberg notes that concerns about technical glitches with the Soyuz have also raised concerns about the openness of the ISS partners.
MORE...

14 March 2011
A chance of a lifetime: the missions to Comet Halley
Twenty-five years ago today the Giotto spacecraft flew past the nucleus of Comet Halley, part of an international armada of spacecraft sent to study the comet. Andrew LePage examines the Soviet, Japanese, and European spacecraft sent on a one-in-a-lifetime mission.
MORE...

14 March 2011
American leadership in space: leadership through capability
What does it mean for the United States to be a leader in space? Christopher Stone argues that such leadership must come from maintaining the country’s edge in spaceflight capabilities instead of relying on others.
MORE...

14 March 2011
Why commercial human spaceflight will be safer, less expensive, and necessary
Development of commercial crew transportation systems has been one of the biggest hot-button topics in spaceflight today. Owen Garriott and Alan Stern make the case for why such systems are vital to America’s future in space.
MORE...