Virgin Galactic has unveiled the Spaceport America, and its a gem!

“While there is still work to be done in driving to completion of the vehicle development program,” Virgin Galactic president and CEO George Whitesides said at the ceremony, “the dedication event is an opportunity for us to recognize all the people in New Mexico and around the world who have worked so hard to turn a patch of ranch land into the world’s first commercial spaceport.”

Lets see what all the fuss is about…

Looking good there!

Here’s the video of the Handover of the Keys bythe Governor of New Mexico. I want one of those!

Astrophotographers Stephane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado travelled to the Paranal Observatory on a 2,635m-high mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert and took all the images in this most amazing time-lapse video.

It also shows the four separate optical telescopes – the Very Large Telescope ( or VLT) – that monitor the movement of the celestial bodies. The video is a little slow in getitng started and your boss might want to klap you upside the noggin for wasting his precious time and bandwidth, but sneak a peak, it’s truly wondrous…

American armchair astronaut David Martines posted a clip of his trip to the surface of the planet on YouTube.

He found the image on the Red Planet by accident but has provided fellow explorers with the coordinates of the ‘object’ so they can discover it for themselves.

He used Googles maps of the astral body and his video has already clocked up a 58,000 views.

David explains how he found the ‘space station’ or possibly ‘power station’ quite by accident at coordinates 71 49’19.73″N 29 33’06.53″W.

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ufos/3615234/Space-station-found-on-Mars.html#mySunComments#ixzz1OOTzcHuV

A woman in the States tried to sell a moon rock for 1.7 Million Dollars, her plan would have been flawless if the customer she was dealing with wasn’t a NASA scientist. They agreed on a price, she pulled out the rock and like a swarm of ants the authorities made sure she was detained. No one knows how she got it but she sure as hell doesn’t have it anymore.

About 2 200 samples of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust – weighing about 380kg – were brought to Earth by Nasa’s Apollo lunar landing missions. A recent count showed 10 states and more than 90 countries could not account for their shares of the grey rocks.

You can’t put a price on the moon. It’s not rocket science.

It dropped from a height of 15km to see if it could adjust speed and bearing with various wing configurations. Well it can. Things are going ahead smoothly and we will soon see commercial spaceflight hitting its straps. Which is so awesome I don’t have anything more to say about that.

I’m betting that’s going to lead to some sort of fee structure that no-one is going to like. Lovely.

Apparently a deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, although it’s being said that negotiations aren’t yet final and a deal could still fall apart. Including Skype’s long-term debt, the total value of the deal is about $8.5 billion.

Representatives for Microsoft and Skype declined to comment.

via Microsoft Near Deal to Buy Skype for Nearly $8 Billion – WSJ.com.

“What an awesome way to start the day. SpaceShipTwo looked positively beautiful today on her maiden feathered flight!” Will Pomerantz, Virgin Galactic vice president for special projects, said in a tweet.

During the test, SpaceShipTwo did not fire its rocket engine for a climb into space. Instead, a mother ship lifted it to 16 000m where it was released. It then rotated its twin tail booms upward 65°, Virgin Galactic said.

As SpaceShipTwo descended almost vertically through the sky, it was slowed by the drag of the folded tail, similar to the way feathers slow a badminton shuttlecock. The reconfiguration will be a critical part of the spaceship’s descent through Earth’s atmosphere after suborbital trips into space.

via Successful test for space tourism ship: News24: Sci-Tech: News.

One of the sources said Facebook is considering a buyout of Skype at a price of between $3 billion and $4 billion. Others pointed out that Skype’s IPO, which has been recently delayed by its new CEO until the second half of 2011, was expected to raise less than that, around $1 billion.

The other source told Reuters the deal won’t be a purchase by Facebook, but a joint venture between Facebook and Skype.

via Facebook to Buy Skype? [REPORT].

“I’ll cry when it launches. I’ll cry when it comes back.” said Laverne Woodard, who began working for Nasa as a shuttle payload logistician in 1980, a year before the first shuttle flight. “When you watch them go up, you feel you’ve touched a piece of history.”

The retired Nasa worker, is not ready to give up . “My children and grandchildren might get to Mars. You never know,” she said. Woodard retired five years ago but came right back to the Kennedy Space Centre as a volunteer and has attended all 133 shuttle launches to date.

Shuttle worker layoffs already have begun and economists fear a ripple effect through the businesses,  those workers supported and the hotels and restaurants that catered to Nasa customers and spectators.

Space shuttle Endeavour, carrying the European-built Alpha-Magnetic Spectrometer and ESA astronaut Roberto Vittori is due to blast off from Kennedy Space Centre at 19:47:52 GMT Friday 29 April, 2011. It will be the start of the penultimate Shuttle mission and the final voyage of Endeavour.

The space shuttle Endeavour is seen on launch pad 39a as a storm passes by prior to the rollback of the Rotating Service Structure at Kennedy Space Centre.

I’ve covered the shuttle program story over the last wee while and for me, sitting half way across the world from where this is all happening , it is the saddest thing.  There are no plans for a replacement space craft or shuttle program.

South African Elon Musk, head of private US company SpaceX hopes to put an astronaut on Mars within 10 to 20 years.

To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

“We’ll probably put a first man in space in about three years,” Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. “We’re going all the way to Mars, I think… best case 10 years, worst case 15 to 20 years.”

SpaceX is one of the two leading private space companies in the US and has won $75m in funding from the US space agency Nasa to help its pursuit of developing a spacecraft to replace the space shuttle.

The company has had various goals mooted in recent years, amongst these is a plan to get cargo ships to Mars and beyond.

“Our goal is to facilitate the transfer of people and cargo to other planets, and then it will be up to people if they want to go,” said Musk, who also runs the Tesla company which develops electric cars.

The US space shuttle programme is winding down later this year with final flights of Endeavour set for next week and Atlantis in June, ending an era of American spaceflight that began with the first space shuttle mission in 1981.

When the shuttle programme ends, the US expects private industry to to fill the gap by creating the next generation of spacecraft to transport astronauts into space. I don’t think they will need to look very far, with private companies falling over themselves to fill the gap.

“A future where humanity is out there exploring stars is an incredibly exciting future, and inspiring, and that’s what we’re trying to help make happen,” Musk added in the interview.

Earlier this month SpaceX unveiled what Musk has called the world’s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, which will have its first demonstration flight at the end of 2012. The launcher is designed to lift into orbit satellites or spacecraft weighing more than 53 tons – more than twice the capacity of the Space Shuttle or Delta IV Heavy launcher.

SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, is one of two private companies that Nasa has contracted to transport cargo to the International Space Station.

Musk, a South African who made his fortune in the internet, created SpaceX in 2002.

via SpaceX aims for Mars: News24: Sci-Tech: News.

The process involves pumping pressurised water, sand and chemicals into the ground to extract the gas.

The cabinet decided to stop the development until the ecological consequences have been studied.

Several government departments will lead the research into whether the semi-arid Karoo region could be damaged by fracking.

“Cabinet has made it very clear that clean environment together with all the ecological aspects will not be compromised,” said government spokesperson Jimmy Manyi in a statement.

I spent the last weekend in the Karoo and you only have to live out there for a week or so to understand the value of clean water.

I challenge each and every one of us to go out there and see for themself the implications of allowing a process which further complicates the water issue in this semi desert region.

Over the many years the “royal Star” had been written off  by historians claiming it was merely propaganda. Martin Lunn, the former curator of astronomy at the Yorkshire Museum in northern England said it could have been the supernova called Cassiopeia A.

Cassiopeia  was a star that eventually collapsed  and blew apart. Its dramatic flare of light took 11 000 years to cross the cosmos, finally reaching Earth in the 17th century. Cassiopeia A  is a supernova remnant in the constellation Cassiopeia and the brightest astronomical radio source in the sky, with a flux density of 2720 Jy at 1 GHz.

The supernova occurred approximately 11,000 light-years away in the Milky Way. The expanding cloud of material left over from the supernova is now approximately 10 light-years across. Despite its radio brilliance, however, it is extremely faint optically, and is only visible on long-exposure photographs.

A supernova  is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months.

Lunn took a new look at the evidence and says that this star could perhaps have appeared in the skies on May 29 1630, the same day King Charles II was born.

Cassiopeia A

Lunn’s work questions  the current method for dating supernovae, but leads to the exciting possibility of solving a decades-old astronomical puzzle.

A supernova spotted in 1572 by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe lingered for 18 months. Its appearance destroyed the notion, set in stone by Aristotle, that the Universe was fixed and unchanged. It reputedly was the inspiration for the terrifying celestial portent in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell was part of a team that discovered pulsars in 1967. Burnell was asked about the Mayan Calendar and why it ends in 2012. Doom and gloom people!

We all like a bit of drama so why not make crap up, right?

There is a book out on the Ancient Sumerians having had contact with extra terrestrial beings on a planet called Nibiru. Apparently this planet is going to collide with Earth in 2012. So the world is going to end because some modern day scientists or psycho’s believe that the ancient were able to predict this. Maybe. I guess we’ll never know – unless we have some proper genetic materials to work with.

So is Nibiru out there. Can we see it?

“That would be very difficult for ancient people to detect against the star background, because it would appear that the planet is moving backward and forward. There’s some suspicion of trouble there” Burnell said.

She said that if the planet was on a collision course with Earth in 2012, it would already be very close and easily visible to astronomers. “If it’s going to collide with the earth, it should be close – near the orbit of Jupiter or Saturn – so we’d see it by now. There is a possibility it could be a star, but then it would be so bright, we’d see it – even during the day,” she said.

I’m with the Doctor on this one. I mean yes the ancient ones were clever and awesome and had all these neat tricks  and pretty creepy ways of doing this or building things but let’s face it; If the world is ending next year, surely our governments would be in a flat spin by now? Building space ships in a hurry? We read about people who think that the ancients were given instructions or were given help to build all their (amazing) structures. *dum dum dum – think the movie 2012 music make up your own theme song for end of the world music*

By the way, if you’re reading this from another universe please click on the like button so it can show up on your outerspacebook page.

So why does the Mayan calender end in 2012?  Burnell reckons they ran out of space and if they were still around they probably would have started on their next cycle by now. Burnell for president!

Since 1980 NASA started the shuttle program which will have seen the five orbiters , Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour fly more than 130 times, carrying over 350 people into space and flown over half a billion miles. This is about as far as Jupiter is from Earth.

I’ll give it to the Americans. They certainly proved that the sky is not the limit and have given us a better understanding of our universe.The first shuttle was launched on April 12 1981 exactly 20 years after the first human, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, was launched into space.  April 12 1961. This market the first human in space as well as the first orital flight of a manned vehicle.

The space program is coming to a close and everyone wants to know what the future holds for space and space travel. We all know Richard Branson has launched Virgin Galactic but what are NASA’s plans? NASA’s chief technlogist predicts that it will be another decade before they can build another vehicle to send Astronauts into space. NASA will now consentrate on experiments with the ISS ( International Space Station) and on partnerships with private industries to build the next space craft.

Spending is squeezed and Nasa is at odds with lawmakers over a 2016 timeframe for building a new heavy-lift rocket and  crew vehicle to replace the 30-year-old shuttle program,  developing the future mode of travel could take longer than Congress, or the US public, may want to hear.

“In that decade not only will we fully utilize the International Space Station but we will develop the capabilities to send humans up and down through the commercial crew program and to send humans beyond low Earth orbit with the space launch system and the multipurpose crew vehicle,”"In that decade not only will we fully utilize the International Space Station but we will develop the capabilities to send humans up and down through the commercial crew program and to send humans beyond low Earth orbit with the space launch system and the multipurpose crew vehicle”

In January NASA told congress that they could not build another shuttle in the current time frame. A second  progress report is due in April, with the shuttle Endeavour scheduled for its final journey to the ISS on April 19, followed by Atlantis June 28.

If you want details on past and future space missions you can look here.

Lemons make excellent lemonade , it’s great with tequila and if you don’t have any juice, just add sugar and water and you have your own home made mini lemonade. You can eat the pulp, prepare drinks, sorbets, pastries, etc… It is credited with many virtues, but the most interesting is the effect it produces on cysts and tumors.

Citrus is also considered as an anti-microbial spectrum against bacterial infections and fungi. Effective against internal parasites and worms, it regulates blood pressure which is too high and as an antidepressant. It combats stress and nervous disorders.

It destroys the malignant cells in 12 cancers, including colon-, breast -, prostate-, lung- and pancreas cancer, this comes from the largest drug manifacturing company in the world.

The compounds of this tree showed 10,000 times better than the product Adriamycin, a drug normally used chemotherapeutic in the world, slowing the growth of cancer cells. This type of therapy with lemon extract only destroys malignant cancer cells and it does not affect healthy cells.

Why do 80% of the world not know about this? Why the drug company won’t make any money by giving away the secret will they?

Discovery, the oldest out the fleet will be spending the rest of it’s days at the Udvar Hazy Centre in Virginia and Atlantis, set to be the final shuttle to fly in June, will make its permanent home at the Kennedy Space Centre, host of shuttle launches in the past three decades. Endeavour will come home to  the California Science Centre in Los Angeles. The Enterprise never flew in space and will be sent to New York where it will be on display for all to see on  a US aircraft carrier docked off Manhattan, This is the USS Intrepid Air and Space Museum. The Enterprise is currently on display at the Udvar Hazy Centre.

Nasa hosted a ceremony to honour Columbia, which was the first shuttle to fly in space on April 12 1981. The two-day flight was meant to test the shuttle’s ability to carry astronauts  into orbit and back. Columbia unfortunately exploded killing all 7 crew members.

Challenger,the original member of the shuttle fleet,  exploded 73 seconds after lift off in 1986. All seven astronauts died.

After the final missions by Endeavour in April and Atlantis in June the space program will be closed for good. Discovery ended its last journey to the International Space Station in March.

It’s all a bit sad really… What comes next you say? I’ll tell you about that later

Today is THE day. Larger , the Zone Radio super charger mentioned it in his show last Friday. He mentioned how April is a good month to start things and I agree.  This year April marked  the birth of Zone Radio, but April also marks the 50th anniversary of the first human in space and it also marks the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle launch. Awesomeness!  You’ll remember I posted an article about that.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin - First Human In Space

Remember how I wrote that I was going to get Mahpicki the Mahpuki side-kicky to come over? Well she is , and we gonna get some good wine, we gonna get Joe Social to calibrate the telescope and we gonna celebrate from when the first star appears in the sky , right until the last star disappears over the horizon tomorrow morning.

I’ve found you a video of the first shuttle launch incase, like me, you weren’t around to see Columbia take off  in 1981.

To infinity and beyond!

South Africa is building the Karoo Array Telescope (MeerKAT) which is a precursor instrument for the SKA ( Square Kilometre array) , but will now be amongst the largest and most powerful telescopes in the world.

For your next lesson:

“Interferometry refers to a family of techniques in which electromagnetic waves are superimposed in order to extract information about the waves. An instrument used to interfere waves is called an interferometer. Interferometry is an important investigative technique in the fields of astronomy, fiber optics, engineering metrology, optical metrology, oceanography, seismology, quantum mechanics, nuclear and particle physics, plasma physics, remote sensing and biomolecular interactions.”

Scientists want to study the early universe with the MeerKAT

According to astronomer Dr Sarah Blythe , the MeerKAT could be the most sensitive radio interferometer in the southern hemisphere and in leading a team of 56 they will try and find out why there is a decline in star formation in galaxies by studying the prevalence of neutral hydrogen in the universe.  They plan on looking back  6 to 8 billion years and are hoping to measure the gas of the most distant galaxies.

Cool hey? You can read more about MeerKAT here

The linkup took place 350km above the Andes Mountains of Chile

On Tuesday, these 6 men will mark the 50th Anniversay of the first Human in Space. The first human in space was Russian Cosmonaut,  Yuri Gagarin. Funny enough April 12th is not only the 50th anniversary of the first human in space, it is also the 30th anniversary of the first shuttle launch into space.

This is not a big thing for many people but entering space, landing on the moon and exploring our solar system from earth is , in my mind, one of the humans race’s greatest accomplishments. So on Tuesday, I wil take my Asstastic ass, park it  on my balcony,  get  the telescope, one glass of wine and one Mahpicki to mark these anniversaries in my own special way.

Virgin today announced the launch of Virgin Oceanic.

I love any sort of exploration and I’m a big admirer of Richard Branson. So this is right up my alley. I can only imagine what this deep sea kind of exploration might bring to light.

“There is just so much to explore, so much to discover,” Branson told reporters. “We are going to obviously come across some fascinating creatures and learn some fascinating things that will hopefully be useful for mankind.”

Branson said he expects the project to cost less than $10 million.

Branson said Virgin Oceanic could one day take passengers on deep sea dives, just as his Virgin Galactic project may one day take wealthy passengers on suborbital spaceflights.