February 23 News Items

Nova Scotia Should Get Behind Spaceport, Says Opposition (Source: CBC)
The Nova Scotia government needs to step up and make sure the proposed PlanetSpace Inc. project goes ahead on Cape Breton Island, say opposition politicians. Liberal Leader Stephen McNeil said Thursday that the Conservative government should take a proactive role in supporting the company that wants to build a spaceport in Cape Breton. The Chicago-based company, PlanetSpace, lost its bid to win a $170-million NASA-sponsored competition Monday. But chairman Chirinjeev Kathuria said Wednesday that his company is still going ahead with plans to develop space tourism and a low-orbit courier service from Cape Breton. McNeil said the government should get on board with the project. Right now, the province has offered PlanetSpace Crown Land in Cape Breton, but negotiations are continuing.

Tampa-Area Man Builds Early NASA Capsule Replicas in Garage (Source: CBS4.com)
Bruce Olds isn't certain exactly how his interest in America's space program became an obsession. the Tampa native has spent countless hours creating detailed, full-size metal replicas of NASA space capsules that carried America's first astronauts. Olds' reproduction of the capsule piloted in May 1961 by Alan Shepard, the first American in space, has been on display at the Museum of Science & Industry since 2002. Until its recent sale, another 500-pound replica of a Mercury 7 capsule rested on a trailer in the garage of Olds' Thonotosassa home. A half-finished Gemini capsule awaits further attention from its detail-driven creator.

Japan Launches Experimental Internet Satellite (Source: Reuters)
Japan launched an experimental communications satellite on Saturday as part of an ambitious space program that could help ensure super high-speed Internet access in remote parts of Japan and elsewhere in Asia. The H-2A rocket carrying the 2.7 ton "KIZUNA" (WINDS) communications satellite took off from the tiny island of Tanegashima, about 1,000 km south of Tokyo. The KIZUNA, equipped with three antennas targeting Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific regions, is referred to as the Wideband InterNetworking engineering test and Demonstration Satellite or WINDS.

Texus 45 Suborbital Rocket Successfully Launched from Sweden (Source: SSC)
The sounding rocket Texus 45 was successfully launched today from the Swedish Space Corporation’s launch facility Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden. The rocket provided 398 seconds of weightlessness for the three experiments onboard. The Texus project is a sounding rocket program with the primary aim to investigate the properties and behaviour of materials, fluids and biological samples in a weightlessness environment. Texus 45 is funded by the German space organisation DLR and carried out jointly by DLR, EADS Astrium, Kayser Threde and SSC.

Wayne Hale to Lead Shuttle/Constellation Transition (Source: Florida Today)
NASA shuffled shuttle program management Friday, sending its chief off to a newly created post and installing his deputy in the top spot. Wayne Hale, who played a pivotal role in NASA's recovery from the 2003 Columbia accident, will lead a new office responsible for developing strategies for a smooth transition between shuttle and International Space Station operations and moon missions. The transition will trigger significant job losses, including 2,500 to 3,500 at Kennedy Space Center, according to local government estimates. A five-year hiatus in NASA human spaceflight is projected before the U.S. sends astronauts back to the moon by 2020.

Stop Shooting Up the Thermosphere (Source: LA Times)
Any student of rocketry, ballistics or barroom darts can appreciate the Navy's feat this week in hitting a minibus-sized object 153 miles above the Pacific Ocean. But questions about the timing of and the need for the Pentagon's destruction of a defective spy satellite will not go away any time soon. The prospect of a space arms race is unappealing, and there's a reason anti-satellite missile testing fell into disuse. The more than 50 countries that maintain satellites are increasingly mindful of the problem of clutter in the precious resource of near-Earth space. We hope we've seen the last of shooting up the thermosphere, even for good reasons.

Spacehab Statement on COTS Loss Mitigation Strategies (Source: Spacehab)
“While we are disappointed that Spacehab was not selected as a winner of the COTS competition, we want to be certain to convey to our stockholders that the Company has been aggressively pursuing other valuable opportunities including growing our profitable Astrotech subsidiary, primarily through our expanded long term relationship with the U.S. Government Office of Space Launch and our announced end-to-end ALLSAT satellite service system. Also, by design, most of the costs and advanced engineering that were invested in the COTS ARCTUS Program are also being applied to advance our ALLSAT satellite system," said Spacehab CEO Thomas B. Pickens, III.

“Additionally, Spacehab is committed to commercializing the valuable discoveries that we have uncovered in previous and in-progress microgravity studies that could soon translate into tangible vaccines and drug treatments. And finally, the Company is developing various space technology spin off products including the Mini Mass Spectrometer, expected to be a robust solution for the security applications market in the detection of a variety of explosives, illegal narcotics, and biochemical contaminants."

Giant Sheets of Dark Matter Detected (Source: Discovery News)
The most colossal structures in the universe have been detected by astronomers who tuned into how the structures subtly bend galactic light. The newfound filaments and sheets of dark matter form a gigantic features stretching across more than 270 million light-years of space--three times larger than any other known structure and 2,000 times the size of our own galaxy. Because the dark matter, by definition, is invisible to telescopes, the only way to detect it on such grand scales is by surveying huge numbers of distant galaxies and working out how their images, as seen from telescopes, are being weakly tweaked and distorted by any dark matter structures in intervening space.