Space
Access 12 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..
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 mining to fully
reusable suborbital space vehicles.
Here is the August
episode of the Virtual
SpaceTV 3D show, which was created by BINARY
SPACE with story content from HobbySpace.
The space news and weather is presented by virtual hosts
Amanda Bush and James C. Birk.
..
In this program, Amanda begins with a report on the
successful landing by the Curiosity rover on Mars. It
survived its seven minutes of terror just fine. Amanda
then talks about NASA's selection of three companies
for the agency's commercial crew transport program.
In a few years, NASA astronauts will ride on US commercial
vehicles to reach low earth orbit. Amanda also notes
that this summer Masten
Space and Virgin
Galactic have been test flying their rocket vehicles
and Armadillo
Aerospace will soon fly its reusable Stig-B rocket
to space. James talks about recent solar flares, aurora,
and meteor showers. The program concludes with a tribute
to an astronaut who made great contributions to the
US space program.
These videos are intended as demonstrations of an experimental
technique for generating animated presentations. The
show was generated autonomously by software according
to a text script. The project is described in the Virtual
Producer whitepaper (pdf). For further information
contact info@binary-space.com.
More and more real scientific research
projects which invite members of the general
public to participate are opening up all
the time. These are now often referred to
as Citizen Science projects.
I have often pointed here to programs like
Zooniverse,
which offers astronomical and space science
related Citizen Science projects such as
Planet
Hunters and Moon
Zoo.
Last month we reported here on Masten
Space Systems flights of their Xaero
vertical takeoff and landing (VTVL) rocket
vehicle. The video below shows a flight
of their older vehicle called Xombie. The
flights are for a group at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Lab that is using Xombie to test their guidance
and navigation system for use on future
landers on Mars and other places in the
solar system. Here's a description of the
flight from Masten's blog: Xombie
750 Meter Downrange Flight, Precision Landing
..
And here is a "Bonus Compilation"
of views from various cameras of the flight.
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