You saw it on the news. You read about it in the press. But now you can learn the inside story of the team that launched the world’s first civilian rocket into space.

As many of you know, I was one of the team leaders of this historic mission.  On May 17, 2004, after years of agonizing rocket crashes and catastrophes — some quite spectacular — we accomplished our remarkable goal.

I stuffed the book with 90 full-color photos to bring the adventure to life in vivid detail.  It’s 244 pages long in a wonderfully oversized 6×9 format.  (Paperback size wouldn’t do justice to the glorious color images.)  Check out the covers here.

You can order the book from Amazon by clicking here.

I encourage you to check out my book’s companion Web site at www.TheNewRaceToSpace.com.  You’ll see lots of interesting videos and other neat stories. And, as a bonus, you can save $2.00 if you use the Web site’s special ordering link and enter Discount Code NDE55XNW.

(LA Times)  “Drilling into the Martian surface in search of signs of ancient life, the Mars Curiosity rover hit the jackpot, NASA said Tuesday.  The intrepid geologist on wheels analyzed a powdered sample pulled out of the Red Planet last month and  discovered some of the basic building blocks of life — and signs of a past environment capable of hosting primitive microbes.  ‘We have found a habitable environment that is so benign and is so supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it,’ mission lead scientist John Grotzinger, a Caltech geologist, said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.”   For the complete article, click here.   Image courtesy of NASA

[DVICE]  NASA reports the Curiosity rover has successfully drilled a hole, 0.63 inches wide and 2.5 inches deep into a sample of sedimentary bedrock. Ground control will now use the rover’s robotic arm to collect samples for processing in its self contained laboratory, looking for evidence Mars may have once harbored water.  The agency released a photo of the hole captured by Curiosity, and in a press release NASA’s associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld said, “The most advanced planetary robot ever designed is now a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars.”

A Ukrainian-Russian rocket carrying a US-made telecommunications satellite has plunged into the Pacific Ocean shortly after launch.

The Zenit-3SL rocket, which was being operated from a floating pad south of the Hawaiian islands, failed 40 seconds after the lift-off at 06:56 GMT.

Officials say no-one was hurt as a result of the incident.

Intelsat-27, which weighed some 6.2 tonnes at launch, was to have provided direct-to-home TV services and mobile broadband connections.

Eight years ago, NASA’s Opportunity rover came across strange-looking spheres that were nicknamed Martian blueberries — and now the rover has sent back a picture showing a different flavor of Marsberry that has the experts scratching their heads.

“This is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission,” Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the rover mission’s principal investigator, said today in a news release.

The golf-cart-sized Opportunity rover used the microscopic imager on the end of its robotic arm to take a super-close look at the spherical shapes. These particular berries, measuring as much as one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter, cover an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of Endeavour Crater’s western rim.

“Kirkwood is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects,” Squyres said. “Of course, we immediately thought of the blueberries, but this is something different. We never have seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars.”

via Spheres spark new Martian mystery – Cosmic Log.

PASADENA, Calif. AP — Thirty-five years after leaving Earth, Voyager 1 is reaching for the stars. Sooner or later, the workhorse spacecraft will bid adieu to the solar system and enter a new realm of space — the first time a manmade object will have escaped to the other side.

When NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 first rocketed out of Earth’s grip in 1977, no one knew how long they would live. Now, they are the longest-operating spacecraft in history and the most distant, at billions of miles from Earth but in different directions.

They’re still ticking despite being relics of the early Space Age. Each only has 68 kilobytes of computer memory. To put that in perspective, the smallest iPod — an 8-gigabyte iPod Nano — is 100,000 times more powerful. Each also has an eight-track tape recorder. Today’s spacecraft use digital memory.

Wednesday marks the 35th anniversary of Voyager 1′s launch to Jupiter and Saturn. It is now flitting around the fringes of the solar system, which is enveloped in a giant plasma bubble. This hot and turbulent area is created by a stream of charged particles from the sun.Outside the bubble is a new frontier in the Milky Way — the space between stars. Once it plows through, scientists expect a calmer environment by comparison.

When that would happen is anyone’s guess. Voyager 1 is in uncharted celestial territory. One thing is clear: The boundary that separates the solar system and interstellar space is near, but it could take days, months or years to cross that milestone.Voyager 1 is currently more than 11 billion miles from the sun. Twin Voyager 2, which celebrated its launch anniversary two weeks ago, trails behind at 9 billion miles from the sun.

via 35 years later, Voyager 1 is heading for the stars – Businessweek.

The Mars rover Curiosity is indulging in a flurry of multimedia activity ahead of its science mission proper.It sent the first image from its 100mm telephoto lens, already spotting an intriguing geological “unconformity”.Nasa also released a colour panorama of Mount Sharp, the rover’s ultimate goal.On Monday, the rover relayed “the first voice recording to be sent from another planet”, and on Tuesday it will broadcast a song from artist will.i.am as part of an educational event.But alongside these show pieces, Curiosity – also known as the Mars Science Laboratory – is already warming up its instruments for a science mission of unprecedented scope on the Red Planet.Nasa said that the rover was already returning more data from Mars than all of the agency’s earlier rovers combined.

via BBC News – Curiosity rover’s intriguing geological find.

While Earthdwellers cast their eyes to Mars this week and waited for news from NASA’s Curiosity, lots of action took place closer to home, where the commercial space market has seen progress from every direction. We’ve rounded up a short summary of what happened back on the home planet.

Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser spacecraft team held its Program Implementation Plan Review in Colorado this week, the first milestone in its CCiCap list.

SpaceX completed its COTS (Commercial Orbital Transport Services) agreement this week with a certification from NASA, clearing the way for SPX-1, its first standard cargo flight to the International Space Station.

Orbital Sciences was also slated to fly its Antares rocket for the first time in early October, but there’s no word yet on whether the traffic jam that’s holding up SpaceX will bump them again. Antares is Orbital’s COTS vehicle and a competitor of SpaceX’s Falcon. It has been delayed several times due to launchpad construction at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia.

XCOR Aerospace announced this week that they’ll build a new spacecraft factory in Brevard County, Florida, to build its Lynx 2-person suborbital spacecraft. Lynx takes off and lands horizontally and requires a runway, which in Florida means the Shuttle’s landing strip at Kennedy Space Center.

via As commercial space race intensifies SpaceX, Virgin find they have company | Ars Technica.

This movie from NASA’s Curiosity rover shows most of the high-resolution frames acquired by the Mars Descent Imager between the jettison of the heat shield and touchdown. The video, obtained on Aug. 5 PDT Aug. 6 EDT, covers the last two-and-a-half minutes before touchdown in Gale Crater. Audio recorded from mission control can be heard, counting down the critical events.

Astronomers have spotted a red giant star, some 11 times the mass of our own sun, swallowing up a planet. A similar fate awaits Earth, about five billion years from now.

via Astronomers spot humongous star devouring planet (+video) – CSMonitor.com.

The next step in NASA’s exploration of Mars is the test drive of its rover, Curiosity, on Wednesday. Curiosity’s mission on Mars is to search for signs of life. The rover’s broken wind sensor may make its exploration more challenging.

via NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity gears up for test drive – CSMonitor.com.

After driving all around Mars with four rovers, NASA wants to look deep into the guts of the red planet.The space agency decided Monday to launch a relatively low-cost robotic lander in 2016 to check out what makes the Martian core so different from Earth’s.

via NASA to launch another Mars exploration flight | Fox News.

Satellites, like the people who make them, come in all shapes and sizes. Their parts do as well. And while some thrusters are large and impressive, some satellites need smaller ones. So Paulo Lozano at MIT decided to build a rocket thruster the size of a penny.

The thruster, which looks like anything but, is similar in shape and size to a computer chip. It’s “covered with 500 microscopic tips that, when stimulated with voltage, emit tiny beams of ions. Together, the array of spiky tips creates a small puff of charged particles that can help propel a shoebox-sized satellite forward,” according to Lozano.

The size allows for several thrusters to be put on a single satellite, which could allow it to change orbit and even roll. Though it may not sound it, this is exciting in the world of satellites. Nanosatellites have had trouble with traditional propulsion systems, which allow little space on the them for electronics and communications equipment.

But the microthruster barely adds any weight, allowing for fully-loaded nanosatellites to not only be launched into orbit but to be able to navigate once there.

On Earth, these thrusters are essentially useless. But zero-gravity space presents a very different story. And with the size and flexibility of these thrusters, this could open a new range of possibilities for satellite technology.

via A penny-sized rocket thruster invented at MIT | DVICE.

A rock-zapping laser and telescopic combination called ChemCam is getting a lot of attention with NASA’s rover Curiosity landing on Mars.

But what is it?

Here’s an explainer, as well as more details about the mission.

ChemCam can look at rocks and soils from a distance, fire a laser to vaporize the materials and analyze them with an on-board spectrograph that measures the composition of the resulting plasma. NASA says ChemCam can also use the laser to do less destructive things, such as clear away dust from Martian rocks as well as use a remote camera to acquire extremely detailed images.

Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a tutorial on how the instrument works at a recent news conference.

“Curiosity’s remote sensing instrument [is] designed to make a large number of rapid measurements in some sense to help guide the rover to the most interesting samples,” he said.

He also talked about ChemCam’s imaging capability and said in routine operation the team plans to take images either before or after the laser operation or both, but not during the laser operation.

“The camera is very high resolution. It’s sensitive enough to image a human hair quite easily by 7 feet away,” he said.

After nearly two weeks on the dusty red planet, Curiosity is doing warm-up exercises and getting ready to take off for its first drilling for a rock sample — to a place 1,300 feet away scientists have named Glenelg, a spot where three kinds of terrain intersect.

In the next few days, the one-ton, six-wheeled mobile Mars laboratory will exercise each of its four steerable wheels, turning each of them side-to-side before ending up with each wheel pointing straight ahead. Curiosity will continue warming up by driving forward about 10 feet, turning 90 degrees and then reversing about 7 feet.

Tonight the rover will zap its first rock — one which scientists have dubbed “Rock N165,” a three-inch wide Mars rock that sits about 10 feet away from Curiosity.

“It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, it should be pretty cool too,” Wiens said.

via Mars Rock-Zapping Laser Explained | PCWorld.

In the most complex rocket-landing ever attempted, NASA will literally drop its latest Mar rover onto the Mars surface by a crane from a hovering mother ship. Really!

A year ago (July 12, 2011), I gave you a heads up on NASA’s marvel of planetary-exploration technology in my blog post:  “Take a peek at NASA’s next Mars rover. It’s the size of a Mini Cooper!”

Well, the rover’s 354-million-mile, eight-and-half-month journey is just about over.   “Curiosity” — the nickname for this out-of-this-world vehicle — is poised to land on the Red Planet.

Check out a superb article by UK’s DailyMail — with photos, illustrations, and spine-tingling landing animation — here:  http://bit.ly/NVBY32

Get ready for a wild ride on August 5th.  Buckle up!

Illustration courtesy of NASA

(CNN) — A piece of a debris from a Russian Cosmos satellite passed close enough to the International Space Station on Saturday that its crew was ordered into escape capsules as a precaution, NASA said.

The six crew members were told to take shelter late Friday in their Soyuz capsules after it was determined there was a small possibility the debris could hit the station, the U.S. space agency said in a statement.

“The Expedition 30 crew aboard the International Space Station received an ‘all clear’ to move out of their Soyuz vehicles after a small piece of a Russian Cosmos satellite debris passed by the complex without incident early Saturday,” the statement said.

“They began the process of moving out of the vehicles and back to their regular duties and a weekend off.”

It is the third time in the space station’s history that a crew has had to take shelter in escape capsules because of the possibility of being hit by orbital debris. The last time the crew took cover was in June 2011.

For the complete article, visit http://bit.ly/GYylYK

Image courtesy CNN and NASA

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered an Earth-like planet with balmy 70-degree temperatures: “Kepler-22b”.  The plant is 2.4 times the diameter of Earth, and orbits its sun in 290 days.

But we won’t be visiting anytime soon, as the planet is 600 light years away.  How far is 600 light years?  Well, consider that light travels 186,287 miles each second.  Now multiply 186,287 miles times the number of seconds in 600 years.  Whew!

Scientists have pointed the 42 dish antennas that comprise California’s Allen Telescope Array on Kepler-22b to see if it can detect any radio waves — to perhaps catch a Keplerian broadcast of “Dancing with the Stars” (sorry — couldn’t resist that).

Something to think about:  If scientists on Kepler-22b were scanning Earth for radio or TV broadcasts, they wouldn’t hear anything.  Radio waves travel at the speed of light.  So, they’d be examining Earth as it was 600 years ago — and radio was invented here less than 150 years ago.

For additional details about this planetary discovery, including a video of the mission managers discussing their find, check out the following article in the San Jose Mercury News:  http://bit.ly/smOSZF

Artist’s conception courtesy of NASA / Ames/ JPL-Caltech

As I reported in an earlier post, NASA’s Curiosity rover is about twice as long and about five times heavier than the most recent Opportunity and Spirit rovers.  But what’s really unique is that it’s powered by a radioisotope power system instead of solar panels.  The result:  Curiosity should be able to operate continuously through sandstorms and Martian winters for years.

If you’d like to read more about NASA’s Curiosity rover and its innovative power plant, check out a CNET article at this link:  http://cnet.co/rs8Xlz

Image courtesy of NASA

NASA has introduced a plan to pay private aerospace companies $1.6 billion to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).  A variety of new commercial aerospace companies are expected to compete for the job of providing “turnkey” launch, flight, return, maintenance, and ground-support operations.

The commercialization of space will be an exciting era.  The retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet may provide a short-term space-transportation gap, but — in the long run — the opportunities and new doors that will open will be amazing.

ISS graphic courtesy of NASA

Less than a month into its five-year journey to Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft took this nifty picture of the Earth and moon, as part of the vehicle’s “JunoCam” checkout procedures.  The Earth is the larger bright spot on the left, and the moon is the dot on the right.

The Juno spacecraft has 439 million miles to travel before it gets to Jupiter.  One can only imagine the other photos it may take along its celestial course.

For more information regarding the photo, check out the NASA JPL article at http://1.usa.gov/pDDjTh

For more information on the Juno mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/juno

Many people believe that the first human to step foot on Mars will be from the U.S.  Well, think again.

Discovery published today an interesting article (“Russia and Europe to Send Man to Mars?”) that challenges the common perception that an American would be first to walk on the red planet.

The article quotes Jean-Jacques Dordain, the Director General of the European Space Agency (ESA), as saying that the ESA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roskosmos) would “carry out the first flight to Mars together.”

Russia and the ESA are wrapping up a project in which six individuals simulated a year-and-a-half round-trip to Mars; the team lived the entire time in a cramped 550-cu.-ft. simulated spaceship. The experiment, which will conclude in November, has examined the effects of continuous, close-quarter working on the mind and body.

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle, Russia clearly leads in “heavy lift” rocket technology.  And just this week they unveiled the design of a new manned spacecraft at an international air show.  Bottom line:  Russia and Europe have “the right stuff” — and are doing the right things — to propel them to the goal of Mars.

For the thought-provoking Discovery article, check out http://bit.ly/olFmgH

Mars image courtesy of NASA

Visit the following link http://1.usa.gov/qjThYb to watch the Perseids meteor shower from the comfort of your computer.  You’ll connect to NASA’s Web cameras.  Tonight (Friday, August 12th into tomorrow morning) is the shower peak.  At the Web site, you can also chat with NASA astronomers and support team.  Of course, you can watch the meteor shower the ol’ fashioned way by strolling out into your backyard.  For the best viewing, give yourself a few minutes for your eyes to fully adjust to the dark.  Enjoy!

One of my readers asked me to research something he spotted a couple of years ago: a mouse suspended in mid air without any perceivable support mechanisms.

Yes, it did occur. It was a rather unique NASA experiment. The trick? Scientists used a superconducting magnet to levitate the water inside of a mouse. Here’s an article from LiveScience: http://bit.ly/kb330d

If NASA could develop the system on a larger scale, it’s possible that the same technique could be used with humans to simulate the effects of microgravity. (We’re 60 – 70% water, so the technique should, in theory, work.)

If that fizzles for NASA, fear not: Perhaps the gadget could become part of the next Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas.

SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), a leading private aerospace firm founded by Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal), intends to fly its Dragon capsule via the company’s Falcon launch vehicle to the ISS on November 30th.  It would be huge news if they can pull off this feat, especially with the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet.

According to Garrett Reisman, a veteran NASA astronaut and now an employee of SpaceX:  “The next flight of the Dragon we’re going to go all the way and berth it to the space station, drop cargo off and bring stuff back.”

Stay tuned for more information. 

Dragon capsule image courtesy SpaceX

According to published reports, in nine years Russia intends to de-orbit and dump the ISS into the Pacific Ocean in nine years.  Other ISS partners, however, have different intentions.  The consortium of the U.S. (NASA), Japan, Canada, and the European Space Agency (ESA) has expressed support to keep the space station flying until at least 2028.

In March 2001, the Russian MIR space station was disposed of similarly, as Russia de-orbited the station into the South Pacific Ocean.

Additional information about Russia’s apparent plans for the ISS can be read at http://bit.ly/pxdAR2.  Photo courtesy of NASA