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  • Columbia destroyed

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    The Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed today; one of the worst disasters in spaceflight history. See this Metafilter thread for more information and commentary.

  • Dragonspace

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    Dragon Space – a dedicated web portal for all China-related space news. Pretty nifty, and it has all the latest happenings with their Shenzhou craft, the fourth of which is expected to take off within the next few days.

  • Timeshare

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    Seen on Usenet, about spacecraft yachts for the rich: “Larry Ellison would probably go for it — but even he isn’t rich enough. Here’s an idea, though: An orbital timeshare. Ellison can use it six months of the year; Bill Gates gets it the rest of the time.”

  • China in Space

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    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 imagine…

  • An Evening with George Dyson

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

  • James Webb telescope

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    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…

  • Twisted words

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    3 comments on Twisted words

    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…

  • The BA Festival of Science

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    9–14 minutes

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    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.

  • Segway on Moon

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    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?

  • Space Exploration Act

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    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).