What's happening in space (that's interesting)

Wow, that was impressive. Not only did the escape test go off without a hitch they landed the booster perfectly.

Well to be fair, they were not planning on it taking off, anytime soon. They were just fueling the rocket.

To watch that is to, ever so briefly, be proud to be human.

I got a tour of Blue Origin through a friend about six weeks ago and they talked about the abort test. The guys working on the rocket thought the odds were pretty good they were going to lose the booster due to the damage the escape rocket would cause. So I was very pleasantly surprised to watch it land today.

All the launches so far have been with the same booster/capsule. Now theyā€™ll both be retired and put on display somewhere.

Truly impressive. Reminded me of the feeling Iā€™d get watching launches as a kid.

That was absolutely bad as

Yay!

Meh, I think it would be a much better idea to establish a moon base or an orbital base as a staging area instead of going to mars first. That would be ridiculously expensive to do unless we invent a new kind of drive technology.

Bigelow Aerospace has been working on that: http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/b330/

Maybe if youā€™d started the Mars push when you came into office instead of throwing rocket development back 6 years when you came into office, Barack, that would be something.

Now itā€™s nothing more than trying to distract from a disappointing crewed space legacy, because whoever comes into office next year will reset their own priorities.

Itā€™s a shame programs canā€™t be somehow protected from administration changes.

This is really happening live? Spacewalk? I always miss everything that is livestreamed so it seems to cool to be true I actually caught something happen live.

Earth is so beautiful.

Fairly sure it went on a loop at some point, it was 4 hours of footage.

It goes into a recorded video whenever itā€™s at night time. It says so on the video description.

Earth rise.

Universe has more galaxies - a lot more - than previously thought.

One of the most fundamental questions in astronomy is that of just how many galaxies the Universe contains. The Hubble Deep Field images, captured in the mid 1990s, gave the first real insight into this. Myriad faint galaxies were revealed, and it was estimated that the observable Universe contains between 100 to 200 billion galaxies [1]. Now, an international team, led by Christopher Conselice from the University of Nottingham, UK, have shown that this figure is at least ten times too low.

China launched a couple of astronauts on their way to the Tiangong 2 space lab not long ago. The plan is for them to stay up for 30 days. If all goes well, that will set a record for Chinese astronauts.

Does China have a (deliberately?) terrible PR campaign for its space stuff? I seem to hear about every minor thing that goes on in the US and European space agencies, but I donā€™t seem to see anything about China except for 5 minutes before one of their guys walks on the moon or something.

The Smithsonian has an article up about Lebanonā€™s space program in the 1960s. Yes, you read that right, Lebanon. Manoug Manougian, then 25, organized students at a small university into a ā€œRocket Society.ā€ They had few resources but managed enough success to attract the attention and support of the Lebanese military, and by 1966 managed to send a rocket up 87 miles, well past the recognized boundary of space. But then hostilities in the region made it too dangerous to continue, and much of the Society left the country for safer surrounds. A fascinating bit of history that Iā€™d never run across before.

Wow. Iā€™m reading your post and Iā€™m thinking, ā€œThat name looks awfully familiar.ā€ So I look it up and that dude taught me some concepts in abstract algebra when I was in high school on a summer program to USF. He was an awesome professor. Iā€™m assuming he still is, for that matter. :)