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.
Virtual presenter Amanda Bush reports on the orbiting
of the Moon by the two GRAIL
spacecraft, soon to begin their mapping of the Moon's
gravity. She then talks about the growing enthusiasm
for high
altitude research with commercial reusable suborbital
rocket vehicles. And she shows great views of Comet
Lovejoy. Finally, new spaceweather-man
James C. Birk gives a forecast of near earth objects
passing the earth in the coming years.
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.
Comet Lovejoy was expected to disappear
into the sun but as this video shows, it
skimmed through the solar flames, losing
only its tail before gaining another:
Stratolaunch to Build Giant
Aircraft to Launch Rocket
On December
13th, billionaire Paul Allen announced
that he would fund development of an air
launch rocket system designed by Burt Rutan.
The Stratolaunch
system will involve building the largest
aircraft in history to carry a multi-stage
rocket built by SpaceX.
The rocket will put 13,500 lbs (6120 kg)
into low earth orbit. Initially it will
fly satellites to orbit and later human
passengers.
The carrier aircraft will fly in 2015 and
the first rocket flight is scheduled for
2016.
This video animation shows how the Stratolaunch
system will put a payload into orbit.
:
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