NewSpace
2011 Conference Review
A report on the annual Space
Frontier Foundation's conference held
at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California.
Topics of discussion ranged from entrepreneurial
space businesses to lunar miing to fully reusable
suborbital space vehicles.
Space
Access 11 Conference Review
A report on the annual Space
Access Society's annual conference in
Phoenix, Arizona. The focus, as always, was
on efforts by entrepreneurial companies to
achieve dramatically lower costs for getting
to space..
These videos are intended as demonstrations of an experimental
technique for generating animated presentations. The
show was generated autonomously by software and without
human interaction. The project is described in the Virtual
Producer whitepaper (pdf). For further information
contact info@binary-space.com.
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence from your
PC
Jill Tartar of the SETI
Institute has used the resources of
her TED
Prize and a partnership with Zooniverse
to create SETILive
- a citizen science project that invites
members of the public to assist in analyzing
radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial
signals. This is done visually rather than
with computer software as in the SETI@home
participation project.
The SETILive
home page provides a display of statistics
that include the number of people currently
participating, the number of classifications
and the classification rate:
Masten
Space Systems of Mojave, California
aims to provide routine and frequent access
to space with vertical takeoff and lainding
rocket vehicles. NASA
Flight Opportunities office, for example,
has given Masten a contract to fly research
payloads. The firm is following an incremental
development and test program in which their
vehicles demonstrate greater and greater
capabilities and reach higher and higher
altitudes. On February 17th, a free flight
of Flight
Opportunities - Xaero, their newest
vehilce, flew to 61 meters and came back
down for a safe landing.
..
On February 2nd, Draper Labs flew Masten's
older Xombie
vehicle, which was modified to use their
own autonomous guidance, navigation and
control system:
Run the Satellite
Tracking Tool from BINARY
SPACE right here at HobbySpace
in your browser. The program allows you to track a large
set of satellites in both low earth and geostationary
orbits. (Note: the program requires Microsoft
Silverlight, Version 5 or higher, as well as the latest
version of your browser. Currently the program works on
the Microsoft® Windows® platform only.) The Satellite
Observing section provides additional information
and web resources about the hobby of satellite tracking
and watching.
Real-Time
Space Viewers
Earth
Weather maps, remote sensing
and spysat images.
Space
Weather
Sun, solar wind, aurora images
and the latest data