NewSpace
2011 Conference Review
A report on the annual Space
Frontier Foundation's conference, held
this year 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..
Here is the latest Virtual
SpaceTV 3D show, which was created by BINARY
SPACE with story content from HobbySpace.
The virtual presenter Amanda Bush begins with a story
on the first confirmed exoplanet similar to earth in
orbit around a star similar to our sun. She also talks
about a rocket flight by Armadillo
Aerospace, the setting of a date for the first visit
to the ISS by a SpaceX
Dragon spacecraft, and about Paul Allen's new Stratolaunch
project.
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.
Several space advocacy organizations in
the past few years have sponsored contests
for the best videos that support space exploration
and development. (Some people make such
videos on their own as well.) Most recently
the Coalition
for Space Exploration announced the
winner
and runners-up of its “What’s
Next?” in space exploration contest.
The grand prize winner is Caleb Ekeroth
with his video Visit Mars Today,
which "takes viewers through a timeline
of human spaceflight history into the future
with an in-flight commentary of the first
tourist trip to the red planet".
..
Runner-up Daniel Land Land won for Accept
the Risks, "a video that supports
the beginning of a new era of space exploration
to Mars".
..
And runner-up Sthanley Joseph gives a spirited
monologe about his views of What's Next
for space.
..
It's
a Whole New Outer Space Out There
Blue Origin is Building
and Flying Rockets
It is known that the firm Blue
Origin, which is owned by Jeff Bezos
of Amazon.com fame, aims to design fully
reusable rocket vehicles that will greatly
lower the cost of getting to space. They
are pursuing markets such as space tourism
and research
and even providing NASA astronauts transportation
to the International Space Station.
Blue, however, has been very secretive
about the details of their rocket projects.
It is known that they are developing a fully
reusable suborbital, vertical takeoff and
landing vehicle (VTOL) that can reach 100
kilometers in altitude routinely. In
2007 they posted photos and videos of
a test flight of a VTVL prototype at their
test site in West Texas. Since then they
have been very quiet about their hardware
development.
Recently, however, they have cracked opened
the door a bit. A newly revamped web
site includes photos and videos of another
prototype vehicle (PM2) that they flew twice
in 2011. Here is the PM2 prototype vehicle
on the pad in May 2011:
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