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Tuesday’s CSExtra offers the latest reporting and commentary on space related activities from across the globe. More on the 100 Year Star Ship Symposium, which seeks to become the genesis of Star Trek style human interstellar space travel. Meanwhile, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center continues to face economic hard times. NASA begins a lengthy recruiting effort for new astronauts. NASA’s Dawn probe finds an impressive mountain on the asteroid Vesta. An already famous Martian meteorite may hold evidence of a warmer, wetter Red Planet. Some experts believe the U. S. should hasten efforts to speed human deep space exploration. An update on NASA’s shuttle retirement plans. The U.S. solar power industry reaches a crossroads.
1. From Discovery.com: A look at the 100 Year Star Ship Symposium hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Orlando, Fla., over the past weekend with help from NASA. Free and open to the public, the gathering drew 1,000 participants eager to tackle the many challenges of future interstellar space travel. The sponsors are looking for an organization to lead the effort with a $500,000 DARPA grant. Applications are due Nov. 11.
2. From The Orlando Sentinel: The newspaper offers a grim picture of employment at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. By next summer the workforce is projected to fall to its lowest level since before the start of the Apollo program more than 40 years ago. At an estimated 8,200 workers next year, the workforce will be half what is was in 2008. Uncertainty over NASA’s future is the biggest factor in the decline. The numbers, however; are projected to climb as the agency develops the new Space Launch System.
3. From MSNBC’s Cosmic Log: NASA announces Monday the agency will recruit new astronauts starting next month. The new hires could be in training by mid-2013.
4. From the Coalition for Space Exploration: NASA’s Dawn probe, which has been circling the asteroid Vesta since July, spots one of the largest mountains in the solar system.
http://bit.ly/nJiFow
5. From Space.com: The four billion year old meteorite ALH 84001 once made headlines over claims it contained fossilized evidence of micro fossils from Mars. Now, a new study suggests it holds chemical evidence that Mars was once warm and wet, according to Itay Halevy, of the California Institute of Technology, who led a study that makes the new claim. The meteorite was collected from the Antarctic in 1984.
http://bit.ly/o0XhTq
6. Two from Monday’s The Space Review:
A. In “Creating near term results in U. S. human space exploration,” Alan Stern and Gerald Griffin, two space community veterans, call for an acceleration of human exploration activities. Without more momentum, public enthusiasm and sustainability could slip away, write Stern and Griffin, who served respectively as NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science and director of the Johnson Space Center. They note the Apollo era went from proposal to lunar landing in eight years in an op-ed that also appeared in Space News.
http://bit.ly/pxEi6W
B. In “Science and human exploration together at last,” Jack Burns and Scott Norris find promise that NASA’s future exploration plans will be rich in scientific discovery and make a couple of suggestions to ensure it. For one, human missions an Earth/moon Lagrange point could include serve as a staging point for telerobotics activities on unexplored lunar terrain. Burns is a professor at the University of Colorado Norris is a Lockheed Martin research manager.
http://bit.ly/qNl5fb
7. From Collectspace.com: The website offers an update on NASA’s plans to deliver retired shuttle orbiters to museums in the Washington D. C. area, Los Angeles, New York and Cape Canaveral. As it turns out, Houston will inherit a shuttle display from the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
8. From USA Today: The U.S. solar power industry, which employees 100,000 workers, has reached a tipping point, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Solar panel installations are up, but the industry generates just 1 percent of the energy demand. Federal subsidies are coming to an end, leaving China poised to extend its manufacturing lead.
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