OBAMA UNDER FIRE OVER SPACE PLANS - High-profile critics fear President Barack Obama's commercial overhaul of human spaceflight is going nowhere and could mark the end of half a century of US supremacy among the stars and planets. "We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future," Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the Moon, warned lawmakers at a recent hearing.    More
(Source: AFP - Oct 3)

2 TINY SATELLITES FROM USU PART OF ROCKET LAUNCH SET FOR END OF OCTOBER - Imagine a spacecraft small enough to fit in your hand. It's a reality, part of a trend in the space business that takes advantage of something we all benefit from every day when we use our cellphones and iPads. "We're essentially using the same kinds of technologies that you find in cellphones and in iPads and consumer electronics today, which has allowed us to make a very capable, very small spacecraft," said professor Charles Swenson, of Utah State University.    More
(Source: Deseret News - Oct 2)

STATION’S ORBIT RAISED; SCIENCE AND CARGO TRANSFERS FOR CREW - The engines of the Zvezda service module fired for a two-minute, 49-second reboost of the International Space Station’s orbit Thursday in a maneuver originally planned for next week. The maneuver was performed at 12:45 p.m. EDT and raised the orbiting laboratory’s altitude by 4.7 kilometers, or 2.9 miles.    More
(Source: Space Fellowship - Oct 1)

ORBITAL STATION AVOIDS COLLISION WITH SPACE JUNK - The Russian Mission Control has carried out an emergency adjustment of the International Space Station's orbit to avoid its possible collision with a piece of an old Russian launch vehicle. The orbit was raised by 4.7 kilometers to approximately 387.1 km on Thursday, and the ISS is now nine kilometers above the 10-cm fragment of the Tsiklone-3 carrier rocket launched in 1991.    More
(Source: RIA Novosti - Sep 30)

CHINESE ROCKET SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHES MINI-SPACE LAB - China launched a miniature space module into orbit Thursday, where it will join another craft for the country's first space docking in November and create a destination for up to two manned flights next year. The 19,000-pound Tiangong 1 module lifted off at 1316 GMT (9:16 a.m. EDT) aboard a Long March 2F rocket. Chinese engineers modified the 170-foot-tall rocket for the launch of Tiangong 1, which is heavier and larger than China's manned Shenzhou capsules that previously flew on the rocket seven times.    More
(Source: Space Flight Now - Sep 30)

QUETZSAT 1 SPACECRAFT GOES UP TO SERVE MEXICO AND U.S. - A direct-to-home television broadcasting satellite for Mexico and the U.S. was successfully hauled into orbit Thursday by Russia's commercial Proton heavy-lifting rocket launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.    More
(Source: Space Flight Now - Sep 30)

IS ANOTHER DISABLED SATELLITE HEADED FOR EARTH? - On the heels of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite’s (UARS) splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, Telegraph reporter Andy Bloxham warned over the weekend that a second satellite is headed for Earth and should re-enter our planet’s atmosphere sometime next month. The craft in question is the Röntgensatellit (aka the ROSAT), a 2.4-ton space telescope that was originally constructed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and was disabled after its guidance system failed in 1999.    More
(Source: RedOrbit - Sep 28)

MINOTAUR 4 ROCKET BLAZES FIERY TRAIL INTO SPACE - A Minotaur rocket derived from decommissioned nuclear missile parts blasted off at 1549 GMT (11:49 a.m. EDT; 7:49 a.m. Alaska time) today from the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska. The launch is carrying a U.S. Navy communications satellite to aid troops deployed in battle zones like Afghanistan and Iraq.    More
(Source: Space Flight Now - Sep 28)

SATELLITE LIKELY FELL IN PACIFIC; 'WE MAY NEVER KNOW' - Where in the world is NASA's crashed satellite? On the ocean floor most likely, what's left of it, but nobody seems to know for sure. The best bet is that the fiery breakup of NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), designed to study atmospheric chemistry, scattered debris across a 500-mile swath of the Pacific Ocean. Coming decades after the nuclear era led to U.S. missile-warning radars being placed around the globe, the question remains: Why it wasn't possible to pinpoint the exact areas where pieces of the NASA satellite fell to Earth?    More
(Source: USA Today - Sep 28)

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