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..
Here is the latest Virtual
SpaceTV 3D show, which was created by BINARY
SPACE with story content from HobbySpace.
Virtual presenter Amanda Bush reports on the launch
of the European
Space Agency's ATV cargo truck to the International
Space Station, on the upcoming ISS cargo flight by SpaceX,
and on the research showing that many of the billions
of red dwarf stars in the galaxy should have earth-sized
planets in their habitable zones. The program ends with
spaceweatherman
James C. Birk discussing recent solar activity, brilliant
aurora and a comet diving into the sun.
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. (Note that the virtual
voices have taken another step forward towards a more
natural sound.)
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence from your
PC
A new citizen scientist program
called CosmoQuest
has opened. Their first project for public
participation is Moon
Mappers in which the task is to identify
craters and other surface features in Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter images. This
video describes the Moon Mappers program:
Mine the Sky, Defend the
Earth, Settle the Universe
In this video, Dr.
Lee Valentine of the Space
Studies Institute talks at the LA
Space Salon on the themes, "Mine
the Sky, Defend the Earth, Settle the Universe".
He presents the case for using space resources,
for defending earth from any asteroid on
a collision course with Earth, and for large
scale human settlement of space without
"unobtainium" or magic space transport
systems, rockets are good enough.
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