News Summaries for January 18

Ukraine Space Programs Largely Dependent on Russia (Source: RIA Novosti)
Space cooperation between Russia and Ukraine is one of the key aspects of the two countries' bilateral relations. Their technology and production links go back to the Soviet era. Ukraine, with the help of its Russian partners, has developed seven types of launch vehicles (from the Cosmos to the Zenit), which have orbited over 1,100 spacecraft. It is interesting to note that more than 900 plants and enterprises, over 700 of them in Russia, contributed to the development of the Zenit rocket system, which is undoubtedly Yuzhnoye's most distinctive achievement. Zenit rockets have 72% of their components delivered from Russia.

Moreover, Ukraine lacks its own space center, and practically all rockets and spaceware made in the country must be launched with Russian participation. With little demand for products made in Ukraine...Ukraine, unlike China or India, lacks a full-fledged space industry, and the emergence of one in the next few years is unrealistic because there are just no resources for it. Ukraine is in a position to pursue a more or less credible space effort only in cooperation with Russia.

Europe Faces Crunch Decision Over Mars Rover Mission (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
Members of the European Space Agency face a looming tough decision over whether to cut a planned unmanned mission to Mars or find extra cash to fund it, ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain warned. The ExoMars mission entails sending a 440-pound wheeled rover, which will carry a drill enabling it delve up to two meters below the surface to see if the Red Planet has microbial life, or the potential for it.

Japanese Space Tourism Lease Approved (Source: Saipan Tribune)
The Commonwealth Ports Authority board approved yesterday a Japanese space adventure company's lease request at Rota International Airport. The board voted during yesterday's special meeting to grant Space Japan its proposal to lease land for its space tourism activities. Space Japan submitted a proposal earlier this year, initially to use Saipan and Tinian as possible flight stations. The company aims to build a hangar for its proposed business. Space Japan said that its business is the same as that of Space Adventures in the United States, which has pioneered space tourism.

Loner Stakes Claim to Gravity Prize (Source: New Scientist)
A lone researcher working with borrowed data may have beat a $700 million NASA mission by being the first to measure an obscure subtlety of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The phenomenon in question is the Lense-Thirring effect, a small force produced as the fabric of space-time gets twisted by a spinning mass such as a rotating planet. The force will drag the point at which a polar-orbiting satellite crosses the planet's equator by a small amount each year. After 40 years of development, NASA launched Gravity Probe B to measure the effect of this force on precision-engineered gyroscopes. A final analysis of its data is still to come.

Now Lorenzo Iorio of the University of Bari in Italy says he has found evidence of the effect in Mars data prepared by JPL scientists. The JPL team modelled the orbit of the Mars Global Surveyor craft, accounting for such factors as atmospheric drag and solar radiation pressure. They then compared the model with the real orbital data and produced a graph of "residuals", which quantify the difference between the real and modelled orbits. Iorio used the graph to find the Lense-Thirring effect in the residuals. After grinding through the mathematics, Iorio found that in five years the Global Surveyor's orbit had been dragged around by 1.6 metres. It looked like a clear signature of the Lense-Thirring effect.

Spacehab to Trim Up to 36 Jobs (Source: AP)
Spacehab Inc., which supplies equipment and training to NASA, said it plans to eliminate about 36 jobs as part of an effort to streamline its operations, improve efficiency and lower its overhead costs. The company said the job cuts, which will affect its headquarters in Houston and its payload processing facility in Florida, would save about $3.9 million annually. The move will cost Spacehab about $450,000. The cuts represent 15 percent to 20 percent of the company's 220 employees. Shares of Spacehab rose 18 cents to 92 cents in morning trading on the Nasdaq.

UK Rocket Man Who's Racing the Billionaires Into Space (Source: Evening Standard)
Within just two short years a Manchester-based company could be offering trips into space in a home-grown spacecraft called Thunderstar. Starchaser Industries, was originally set up to place satellites in orbit. But now it has joined a couple of dozen, mainly US, companies in a whole new space race to see who will make space tourism a commercial reality. Later this year Starchaser plans its first space launch from a spaceport in New Mexico. If the company's founder, Steve Bennett, is successful, his spacecraft will become the first British rocket to be launched into space in more than 35 years and by 2009 the first ever to launch a man into space.

Mr Bennett, 42, a former toothpaste factory worker and now a space lecturer at the University of Salford, is very much the David in the space race, trying to outsmart and beat such well-financed Goliaths as Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, dotcom billionaire Paul Allen - co-founder of Microsoft - and Elon Musk, co-founder of the online payment firm PayPal. To help get it off the ground, earlier this week Starchaser was awarded a $150,000 grant from the European Space Agency.

When Does SETI Throw in the Towel? (Source: Space.com)
“At what point would you abandon the search?” That’s a question I get relatively frequently from folks who think that SETI may be a quixotic quest, as futile as searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. After all, modern efforts to find signals from extraterrestrial transmitters are now in their fifth decade. Could it be that those of us who still hope to tune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with a simple, if disappointing message: “There are no aliens”?

The SETI wilderness is incomparably larger [than the frontiers explored on Earth], obviously, and its quarry is cryptic. Even if there are ten thousand transmitting societies nestled in the arms of the Milky Way, we might need to search millions of star systems before we find one. The actual number of star systems that radio SETI experiments have carefully examined is fewer than a thousand. It’s a simple truth, although one not universally acknowledged, that SETI is still in its early stages. Many of its practitioners will tell you that this is a multigenerational experiment. SETI experiments will have examined millions of star systems within a generation. And within two, we could carefully check every star in the Galaxy.

Why Aliens Haven't Found Us Yet (Source: The Guardian)
It ranks among the most enduring mysteries of the cosmos. Physicists call it the Fermi paradox after the Italian Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, who, in 1950, pointed out the glaring conflict between predictions that life was elsewhere in the universe - and the conspicuous lack of aliens who have come to visit. Now Rasmus Bjork, a physicist at the Niels Bohr institute in Copenhagen, believes he may have solved the paradox. Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven't had enough time to look. He found that even if alien ships could hurtle through space at a tenth of the speed of light, or 30,000km a second, it would take 10 billion years, roughly half the age of the universe, to explore just 4% of the galaxy.

Like humans, alien civilizations could shorten the time to find extra-terrestrials by picking up television and radio broadcasts that might leak from colonized planets. "Even then, unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it's still going to take millions of years to find us," said Mr Bjork. "There are so many stars in the galaxy that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in contact with them? Not in our lifetime," he added.

Airline Workers Spot Strange Craft Over O'Hare Airport (Source: Chicago Tribune)
A group of United Airlines employees in November saw a flying saucerlike object hover low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies. The FAA said its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal. No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary. All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights. Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds. Click here to view the article.

Air Force Colonel Reports Hovering Lights (Source: WorldNetDaily.com)
In the wake of reports of unidentified objects flying over Chicago's O'Hare Airport, a retired Air Force pilot has his own mystery with a rash of bright, colorful lights he photographed hovering in skies over western Arkansas last week. "I have no idea what they were," said Col. Brian Fields (USAF, ret.). "At first I thought they were landing lights from an aircraft," he said. "As I continued to observe them they began to slowly disappear, then suddenly one reappeared, followed by two, then three. On at least one occasion four or five appeared. Each time they would slowly fade and eventually disappear. This occurred several times and when they would reappear they might do so in differing numbers and in different positions, sometimes in a triangular shape, sometimes stacked on top of each other, sometimes line abreast, etc. When the objects appeared they might stay illuminated 10 or more minutes." Visit http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53820 to view the article.

Chinese Test Anti-Satellite Weapon (Source: Aviation Week)
U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile. The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, NASA and other government organizations have a full court press underway to obtain data on the alleged test. If the test is verified it will signify a major new Chinese military capability. Neither the Office of the U. S. Secretary of Defense nor Air Force Space Command would comment on the attack, which followed by several months the alleged illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser.

China's growing military space capability is one major reason the Bush Administration last year formed the nation's first new National Space Policy in ten years. Details emerging from space sources indicate that the Chinese Feng Yun 1C (FY-1C) polar orbit weather satellite launched in 1999 was attacked by an asat system launched from or near the Xichang Space Center. The attack is believed to have occurred as the weather satellite flew at 530 mi. altitude 4 deg. west of Xichang located in Sichuan province. Xichang is a major Chinese space launch center.

European Space Agency Ready for Cooperation with China (Source: Xinhua)
The European Space Agency (ESA) declared on Wednesday that ESA was ready to explore the possibility of cooperation in manned space flights with China, a country which had successfully accomplished two such flights. "I would like very much to discuss this with our Chinese partners, if they make the proposal," affirmed ESA chief Jean- Jacques Dordain. "At the moment, we have a lot of cooperation with China in other space exploration domains, but not yet in the field of manned flights."

PlanetSpace Aims Sights at Space Tourism, Plans 2009 Flights (Source: IndUS Business Journal)
Chirinjeev Kathuria’s PlanetSpace Inc. is targeting potential space tourism. The company’s “Silver Dart” space-liner will transport people at an altitude of 62 miles above the ground and at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. On the Silver Dart, for example, passengers could travel to India from North America in only 45 minutes. In the 1990s Kathuria formed MirCorp, a joint venture between Rocket & Science Corp. and Energia. MirCorp became the first private company to launch and fund a manned space program in 2000, signing up Dennis Tito, the world's first space tourist.

Once Kathuria set foot in the space tourism industry, he became firmly sold on the concept of launching commercial passengers into orbit. On the look out for someone who shared a similar vision and passion, he was introduced to Canadian Geoff Scheerin (of Canadian Aero) through a common friend. They soon came together to form Planet Space Inc. in January 2005. "After MirCorp, we wanted to build a successful space program," Kathuria said. "And we formed Planet Space. Now Planet Space has taken over from where MirCorp had left off."

Progress Launched to Space Station (Source: SpaceToday.net)
A Soyuz rocket launched a Progress cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station early Thursday from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft is carrying 2.5 tons of food, water, and other supplies for the station.

Heads of Space Agencies Meet in Paris (Source: ESA)
On 23 January, ESA's Headquarters in Paris will host an 'ISS Heads of Agency meeting' at which Heads of space agencies involved in the International Space Station program (ESA for Europe, NASA for the USA, CSA for Canada, JAXA for Japan and Roskosmos for Russia) will take stock of the status of the ISS and look at the follow-on activities. Significant progress has been made since the endorsement of the ISS configuration and assembly sequence in January 2006, and the partners will together continue the challenging work on ISS assembly, operations and utilisation. At this meeting, each Partner will provide an update on the program status and planning.

Atlantis Launch May Move up a Day (Source: Florida Today)
NASA might move the planned March 16 flight of shuttle Atlantis up a day to create as many launch opportunities as possible before the agency would have to stand down for a previously scheduled International Space Station crew rotation mission. In that case, the shuttle's station construction flight would have to be put off until late April, making it more difficult to complete outpost assembly prior to a September 2010 deadline set by President Bush. Senior NASA managers are expected to make a decision on the issue at a meeting on Jan. 25. A March 15 launch would come at 6:42 a.m.