Mssv

My dad tells me, “According to Chinese media, China will send an astronaut to the orbit within the next 18 months. Before 2010, China is committed to moon landing. By the end of this century, there will be a ‘Chinese Moon City’.”
It’s interesting to hear what the Chinese media are saying - I [...]

A review of a lecture given by George Dyson about Project Orion, America’s planned nuclear bomb-propelled spacecraft.

For several years I’ve been reading about the Hubble Space Telescope’s successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope (now renamed the James Webb Telescope). I’d always assumed that it’d simply be a bigger, more expensive version of the Hubble - hardly anything worth writing home about.
I was wrong; the people at NASA have been busy and [...]

One of the things that I despise the most in this world is when someone twists your words. Glenn Reynolds recently said in a column that Sir Martin Rees, by saying:
“If they were governmental or international (expeditions), Antarctic-style restraint might be feasible. On the other hand, if the explorers were privately funded adventurers of free-enterprise, [...]

Thanks to a generous grant from Trinity College at Cambridge University, I was able to attend the full week-long British Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Festival of Science in Leicester this year, from September 9th to 13th. This is a brief report of what I learned there.

Crazy questions of the day: Would you be able to get air if you were riding a Segway on the Moon at top speed and hit a bump and could you pull off a ‘Mary Poppins’ by floating down from the top of a hotel with just an umbrella?

A new bill entitled the Space Exploration Act of 2002 has been introduced to set forth a strict timetable for NASA to accelerate reuseable space vehicle development and see a Man on Mars by 2022 (and no, it hasn’t been enacted yet).

News about NASA’s Space Launch Initiative aimed at producing the next generation Space Shuttle, and some really funky looking pictures of the contenders.

The reason why the Russian Space Shuttle ‘Buran’ only flew in space once…

Getting a stereo view of Mars - the boys at NASA are pretty damn clever; they’re planning to obtain 3D images of areas the Mars Global Surveyor has already covered by pointing the spacecraft off-nadir (so it doesn’t point directly down).