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Wednesday’s CSExtra offers the latest reporting and commentary on space-related activities from around the world. China looks to early November for its first attempt at docking two spacecraft in Earth orbit. A chorus of concern is growing over funding for NASA’s Commercial Crew Development initiative. A House oversight hearing on the effort is scheduled for today. The Northern lights dip far more to the south than normal this week in response to a solar storm. In Huntsville, Ala., NASA provides professional audiences with updates on Space Launch System development and research aboard the International Space Station. The SLS can look to flat budgets as a hopeful sign, the agency says. Virgin Galactic could be looking to 2013 for the start of passenger operations. An elderly woman becomes the focus of a moon rock probe.
1. From Xinhua.net of China: China is looking to early November for the launching of the unmanned Shenzou 8 spacecraft, which will attempt to carry out the country’s first orbital docking operations. The target is the China’s Tiangong-1 prototype space station module launched in late September.
2. From Spacepolitics.com: A chorus of concern is developing over funding for NASA’s Commercial Crew Development 2 initiative. Worries over inadequate funding have spread from NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and George Nield, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space development, to NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel. On Wednesday, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee plan a hearing on the initiative.
A. From Space News: On the eve of the House hearing, NASA issues a bi-monthly progress report on the agency’s Commercial Crew Development initiative. Now in its second round of funding, the program’s aerospace partners are making substantial progress, according to the official agency update.
B. From Florida Today: State officials and others will announce plans early next week for Boeing to assemble its entry in NASA’s commercial crew development effort, the CST-100, in a former space shuttle hangar at the Kennedy Space Center, the newspaper reports. The work is expected to create 500 jobs.
3. From the Associated Press via the Washington Post: The northern lights illuminate the night skies as far south as Atlanta in response to an intense solar Coronal Mass Ejection that slammed into the Earth’s magnetic field earlier this week.
http://wapo.st/tIITmR
4. From The Huntsville Times: NASA and the science community have only scratched the surface of the International Space Station’s potential, William Gerstenmaier, the agency’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, tells a Huntsville audience. The agency’s professionals should focus on developing exploration capabilities without focusing on specific deep space destinations, Gerstenmaier says.
http://bit.ly/s0HXw9
A. More from the Huntsville Times: NASA is facing a significant challenge as it embarks on the development of the Space Launch System, the heavy lift rocket and Orion/Multipurpose Crew Vehicle that could take astronauts on future missions beyond Earth orbit. Funding will be a constraint. “Flat is the new increase,” one agency official tells an audience of professionals at the von Braun Symposium.
5. From the New York Times: Enterprise, the NASA test shuttle orbiter awarded to New York City’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum for public display in April has a new suitor, the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Wash. When it was revealed the Intrepid does not yet have the facilities for the display, display venues in Houston and Dayton, Ohio revived their efforts to house Enterprise.
http://nyti.ms/v0cdCF
6. From the Wall Street Journal: Virgin Galactic is looking toward 2013 to begin commercial passenger flights from its New Mexico base, several years later than initially projected, according to the WSJ.
http://on.wsj.com/s3198s
A. From Space.com: Virgin Galactic passengers will dress in style when they fly. The flight suits envisioned by Virgin Galactic were inspired by the James Bond film classic Moonraker.
http://bit.ly/uLzjGj
7. From the Los Angeles Times: In an op-ed, the newspaper questions the recent arrest of an elderly woman who tried to sell a bit of moon rock. The woman claims the rock was a gift to her late husband, an aerospace engineer, from Neil Armstrong.
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