This article titled “Newt Gingrich promises moon base by the end of his second term” was written by Stuart Millar, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 25th January 2012 23.36 UTC

There are two givens in any election campaign: 1) the candidates will make grand promises that they can never keep and 2) they will pander to their audience at every opportunity.

But on Wednesday, Newt “grandiose is my middle name” [it isn't] Gingrich took those truisms on to a whole new, extraplanetary level. Speaking to an audience on Florida’s Space Coast ahead of the state’s primary next week, the big-thinking Republican hopeful turned his science fiction fantasies into a hard and fast campaign promise.

“By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” he said. According to Talking Points Memo Gingrich went on to say that the base would be used for “science, tourism, and manufacturing” and to create a “robust industry” modelled on the airline business in the 20th century.

And from there, how could a president ever top that? Well, that would be a mission to Mars obviously, said Gingrich – or Newt Lightyear as my colleague Richard Adams has now dubbed him.

Some reporters in the room undoubtedly would have known that they were witnesses to a historic moment: Gingrich finally losing his mind. But that’s not how Newt saw things, according to Andrew Kaczynski from Buzzfeed Politics.

Of course, Newt has aired his space musings in public before. In December, he defended his policy in favour of lunar mining during one of the live televised debates. Then of course there are his repeated warnings over the dangers to America from an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) caused by a nuclear warhead detonating in space.

By all accounts, Gingrich’s promise drew huge applause on the Space Coast. On Twitter, a far more forbidding place at the best of times, the response was more sceptical. The Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox immediately raised one obvious drawback:

Philip Klein, of the Washington Examiner, was slightly more charitable.

But while the small-minded, earthbound mainstream media may mock, Gingrich can be sure of one thing. If he can pull off a feat as unlikely as winning the Republican nomination, beating Obama in November and going on to secure a second term, anything is possible.

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This article titled “China’s great leap towards superpower status with space station test launch” was written by Jonathan Watts in Beijing, for The Guardian on Thursday 29th September 2011 20.02 UTC

China marked a new milestone on its road towards superpower status on Thursday night by putting its first research module – called the Heavenly Palace – into orbit.

The unmanned Tiangong 1 laboratory, launched from a remote base in the Gobi desert, is a step towards the construction of a fully-fledged orbiting platform.

This latest demonstration of Beijing’s otherworldly ambitions comes in a year when the US has wound down its space shuttle fleet and its partners have said the International Space Station should be buried at sea in 2020.

China’s 10.5-metre cylinder will ride 220 miles into space on board the Long March 2F rocket that blasted off from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre.

It will remain in orbit for two years and be used by Chinese scientists and astronauts to practise rendezvous and docking techniques needed to construct bigger space structures.

Another vessel, Shenzhou 8, will launch later this year and attempt to link up with the lab.

If this is successful and life support systems within the module remain stable, manned missions will be tried next year and yuhangyuan [astronauts] will spend two weeks inside the lab.

Wu Ping, a spokeswoman, said these missions could include China’s first female astronauts.

Following China’s first manned space flight in 2003, the launch of the Heavenly Palace is the second stage in a 10-year programme to build a manned 60-tonne platform by 2020.

This could give China the largest habitable space platform. That title currently belongs to the International Space Station (ISS), which is supported by the US, Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada.

The 400-tonne ISS’s future is in doubt because of the high cost of ferrying supplies through space and the economic problems faced by its principal funders.

China’s political differences with the US have so far stymied hopes to draw the country into this international programme.

When the current commitments expire in 2020, Russian scientists have proposed that the ISS be left to fall into an ocean.

China attaches great political prestige to its space programme – as evidenced by launch events in Beijing and Jiuquan attended by president Hu Jintao and key politburo members.

At this stage, Beijing claims its programme is cheaper. While Russia and the US initially practised docking by sending up two vessels for each trial, China said it saves money by leaving one in space for an extended time.

“The US is still ahead – they sent a man to the moon 40 years ago,” said Fu Song, a professor at the school of aerospace at Tsinghua University.

“But there is the advantage for latecomers. The cost is less and wrong turns can be avoided. If the Tiangong is successful, it will be a significant symbol for the Chinese space industry.”

Though the hardware is based primarily on Russian technology, China says it has enhanced navigation and other systems.

The launch is part of a wider space strategy which has notched up several notable achievements in recent years.

In 2003, China became only the third country to independently put a man – Yang Liwei – in space.

Four years later, it put a satellite – the Chang-e – into lunar orbit and, more aggressively, proved the effectiveness of a satellite-busting rocket.

In 2013, it will collaborate with Russia to send a probe to Mars. Four years after that, the country’s scientists expect to land a lunar rover as a step towards a manned moon landing.

The Tiangong will provide useful preparation for all future missions, according to Ping.

The forward momentum of China’s programme stands in contrast to that of the old space powers. The US mothballed its space shuttle programme in July, when the Atlantis completed its final mission.

Now that Barack Obama has reversed plans for a new manned lunar mission, China is the only country with realistic plans to land humans on the moon.

Such developments could also add to concerns in Washington that China’s space push may be driven my military motives. This is dismissed by Chinese academics.

Jiao Weixin, professor in the school of earth and space at Peking University, said the spirit of space exploration now was different from the past.

“During the cold war, the Soviet Union and the US competed in a space race. Today, the trend is towards peaceful, international co-operation.

“China is involved for scientific reasons and to gain experience. It has no goal of surpassing other countries.”

Different trajectories

After edging out the Soviets and winning the race to land a human on the moon in 1969, the United States has enjoyed more than four decades unchallenged as the world’s dominant force in space. Today’s(Thursday) The launch on Thursday of the first stage of a new Chinese space station could be seen as the beginnings of a shift in that power.

That China has joined the US and Russia as the third nation with the capability of a permanent crewed presence in space is not, in itself, a significant challenge to American supremacy. Nasa launched its first habitable research laboratory, Skylab, in 1973, and even if China’s Tiangong-1 remains safely into orbit after its arrival, it is still likely to be at least another year before its astronauts are able to make any kind of extended-duration stay.

The wider concern of those who follow the US space programme is the converse trajectories the two nations appear to be taking in support of their ambitions in space. China, which has invested millions of dollars in recent years into a burgeoning space programme, now has a flagship piece of hardware already off the launchpad. Nasa currently has no manned launch capability of its own for crewed vehicles followingafter the retirement of the space shuttle fleet this summer. It is a situation that rankles with prominent figures in the US space community, among them Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, who last week lambasted the American programme as an embarrassment”embarrassing” that could soon be eclipsed by the achievements of other nations.

“For a country that did so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable,” he told a congressional hearing on the future of space flight. “Nasa leaders enthusiastically assured the American people that the agency was embarking on a new age of discovery. But the termination of the shuttle, the cancellation of existing rocket and spacecraft programmes, the lay-off of thousands of aerospace workers [and] the outlook for American space activity through the next decade is difficult to reconcile with agency assertions.”

Nasa did, earlier this month, announce its vision of a future spacecraft, the Space Launch System, which will be the most powerful rocket ever built and is designed to carry astronauts farther into space than ever before. Its cost, estimated in leaked Nasa calculations at more than $62bn over the next 15 years, could yet prove a barrier and the first unmanned test flights are not scheduled until 2017.

In the shorter term, Nasa is contracting out work that was previously its lifeblood. Cargo, and eventually crew, transportation to the international space station is being tendered to commercial enterprises such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, established respectively by internet entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. SpaceX plans its first cargo transfer launch in November. Until commercial spacecraft are deemed safe enough, US astronauts must hitch rides aboard Russia’s Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft, at a cost of up to $63m per seat.

But the Russian programme is embroiled in its own turmoil after an unmanned Soyuz failed on its way to the international space station last month, and the next manned mission was delayed until November. China’s progress, and uncertainty elsewhere, have led to renewed calls for greater partnership between the world’s space-faring nations, although US co-operation with the Chinese is specifically prohibited by an act of Congress.

“China has the technology but doesn’t have the spaceflight experience that we do,” said Leroy Chiao, a former ISS commander and shuttle astronaut, and advocate for closer ties. “Co-operation is the way forward. You can argue that Nasa and Russia did all this before but China started its programme in 2003 and in eight years has demonstrated more ambitious flights. It has a modern vehicle with sophisticated technology, so this isn’t just a copy of Skylab. It leaves China on the verge of a major step forward.”Copy ends

Richard Luscombe in Miami

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This article titled “Russian satellite missing within hours of takeoff” was written by Tom Parfitt in Moscow, for The Guardian on Thursday 18th August 2011 18.35 UTC

A Russian communications satellite, the biggest to be built in Europe, went missing hours after takeoff on Thursday.

The £146m satellite was sent into orbit by a Proton rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and disappeared just as flight controllers began to celebrate the launch.

If the Express-A4M satellite is irretrievable it will be a bruising failure for Russia; three navigational satellites for the Glonass global positioning system crashed into the Pacific, off Hawaii, shortly after blasting off in December.

Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the satellite’s Briz-M unit, the engine block responsible for positioning it correctly in high orbit, had fired correctly over four stages but contact was lost before the final firing.

The agency said it had established the location of the engine block but the whereabouts of the satellite remained unknown. “The radio systems are not detecting the satellite in its fixed orbit. There are no signals from the satellite,” a source told Interfax news agency.

The satellite weighed 5.8 tonnes and was fitted with 63 transponders and 10 antennae. It was designed to provide digital television, telephone and internet services across the former Soviet Union.

Space industry sources suggested Russia would turn to Norad, the US-Canadian aerospace defence command, and the Toulouse space centre in France for help in locating the satellite.

The incident is especially embarrassing for Roscosmos after Vladimir Popovkin, head of the agency, said on Wednesday that the organisation would be moving resources away from manned spaceflight.

Popovkin said the satellite launch represented “a change of priorities”. “For us the main thing is becoming the satisfaction of Russia’s demands for satellite information, including communications services and broadcasting.”

The agency said on Thursday it was setting up a commission to investigate the failed launch.

The satellite was jointly built by the Khrunichev centre in Moscow – named after a Soviet-era aviation minister, Mikhail Khrunichev – and Astrium, a Paris-based aerospace company. It was commissioned by the Russian ministry of communications.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

This article titled “George Clooney and Google launch satellite plan to avert Sudan violence” was written by Chris McGreal in Washington, for The Guardian on Wednesday 29th December 2010 20.58 UTC

Google has joined the UN, Harvard University and a pressure group founded by George Clooney to use satellites to scour Sudan for evidence of state-organised violence before next month’s referendum that could see the country split in two.

Clooney said that he had launched the Satellite Sentinel Project to “stop a war before it starts” by warning the government in Khartoum that it would not be able to hide war crimes from the rest of the world, as it did for so long in Darfur, if there is violence in southern Sudan, which is likely to vote on 9 January to secede.

The project plans to reduce the waiting time for satellite images from more than a fortnight to less than 36 hours. The images will be scrutinised by the UN for evidence of mass movements of people, destruction of villages and other indicators of organised violence. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative will also study the pictures.

The images will immediately be made public. If there is evidence of war crimes, appeals for action will be led in part by the Enough Project, an anti-genocide organisation led by the author and activist John Prendergast.

Clooney and Prendergast said today in a statement that there was a serious threat of violence.

“The government in Khartoum has armed militias in contested bordering regions, the government air force has bombed border areas, and both sides have massed military units and equipment along the hottest border spots,” they said. “These areas have witnessed some of the most deadly conflict in the world since world war two. The former director of national intelligence says that southern Sudan is the place in the world most likely to experience genocide.

“We were late to Rwanda. We were late to the Congo. We were late to Darfur. There is no time to wait.”

The referendum is the result of a 2005 peace deal to end more than two decades of civil war that cost more than two million lives. Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, has committed himself to respecting the result of the oil-rich south’s vote. But there has already been violence amid accusations that the government is funding armed groups opposed to independence. Last week, the US vice president, Joe Biden, called Sudan’s second vice president, Ali Osman Mohmed Taha, to express Washington’s concern about potential violence.

Jonathan Hutson of the Enough Project said that advances in technology had given humanitarian organisations an advantage that should help not only expose violence but prevent it. “This project is leveraging Google map makers open source platform to wage peace. Unlike previous satellite imagery gathering projects which were after-the-fact documentation exercises, this project aims to stop a war before it starts,” he said. “War criminals thrive in the dark. They behave differently when you shine a media spotlight on them, when you give them notice that satellite imagery can be quickly shared with the world. This is an open source public platform for waging peace and this transforms anti-war efforts from now on.”

“Passing over Sudan at any given time are perhaps a dozen commercial satellites that have high resolution images available for purchase. The cost barrier has been the key factor that has limited the effective use of satellite imagery analysis in the human rights field,” Hutson added.

The Sudan initiative is being funded for six months by Not On Our Watch, an organisation co-founded by Clooney and other film stars such as Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. “We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching, the world is watching,” said Clooney.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

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Here’s footage of that mysterious fireball that streaked across the Texas sky yesterday…

Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, is planning a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket in 2011. A company called “Space Adventures” takes wealthy explorers to the ISS, and Brin invested $5 million dollars in the company which will serve as his deposit for the planned trip.

(click photo to enlarge)

This is a recently released picture of the earth and moon as seen from the the surface of Mars. This an amazing picture, imagine how far home would look if that was you standing on Mars.

(Via Boing Boing)

A video will be shown to the media tomorrow in Denver, which allegedly shows a live alien for the first time. Supposedly, the video has been seen by “experts” and authenticated.

“It shows an extraterrestrial’s head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that’s visible through an infrared camera,” he said. The alien is about 4 feet tall and can be seen blinking…”

You can read the rest of this story over at Rocky Mountain News.

NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft has successfully touched down on Mars.

Phoenix will be the first spacecraft to study the arctic plains on Mars’ north pole. The craft has a robotic arm that will drill into the Martian ice and retrieve samples which will be analyzed and studied remotely from earth.

Scientists will try to determine if the permafrost has the ingredients needed for life to emerge.

-Chris Jones

President Bush has authorized the Pentagon to perform the first ever shoot down of a broken satellite in space. The busted satellite is falling out of orbit and straight back to earth, but the problem according to the President is that it’s filled with rocket fuel.

Much of the 5,000 pound satellite is expected to survive re-entry with as much as 1,000 pounds of highly toxic and extremely combustible rocket fuel called Hydrazine still on board.

Depending on where the object lands it could cause serious damage to property or even loss of life.

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this at today’s Pentagon briefing:

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the “window of opportunity” for such a shootdown, presumably to be launched from a Navy ship, will open in the next three or four days and last for seven or eight days. He did not say whether the Pentagon has decided on an exact launch date.

Cartwright said this will be an unprecedented effort; he would not say exactly what are the odds of success.

“This is the first time we’ve used a tactical missile to engage a spacecraft,” Cartwright said.

After extensive study and analysis, U.S. officials came to the conclusion that, “we’re better off taking the attempt than not,” Cartwright said.

He said a Navy missile known as Standard Missile 3 would be fired in an attempt to intercept the satellite just prior to it re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. It would be “next to impossible” to hit the satellite after that because of atmospheric disturbances, Cartwright said.

A second goal, he said, is to directly hit the fuel tank in order to minimize the amount of fuel that returns to Earth.

Software associated with the Standard Missile 3 has been modified to enhance the chances of the missile’s sensors recognizing that the satellite is its target; he noted that the missile normally is used to shoot down ballistic missiles, not satellites.

I think this might also be some kind of a statement to China that we can shoot things down in space too. If you recall, China shot down a satellite some months causing worldwide outrage.

-Chris Jones