Book Review: Spacewalker – My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA’s Record-Setting Frequent Flyer

Spacewalker – My Journey in Space and Faith as NASA’s Record-Setting Frequent Flyer by Jerry Ross with John Norberg; Purdue University Press, $29.95; 2013. As a former astronaut, Jerry Ross has written a personal account of his childhood in rural Indiana, then taking...

NASA PhoneSats in Orbit – A “Ringing” Success

NASA’s Smartphone Nanosatellite mission is underway. Now circling the Earth are Alexander, Graham and Bell! The trio of smartphones rode to space April 21 aboard the maiden flight of Orbital Science Corp.’s Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in...

U. S. Astronaut Hall of Fame Welcomes Three

Three NASA shuttle-era astronauts, two of them women, were inducted into the U. S. Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday. Those honored in ceremonies at the Hall, close to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., included Eileen Collins, the first woman...

2014 NASA Budget Starts Ambitious Asteroid Mission

President Obama seeks steady NASA budgets of $17.7 billion through 2018 in the funding request he presented to Congress on Wednesday, enough to start the space agency on an ambitious mission to identify and maneuver an asteroid into lunar orbit, where U. S. astronauts...

Commercial Activity Fuels Growth in Global Space Economy

The global space economy is surging, and the commercial space sector deserves much of the credit, according to the Space Foundation, the Colorado Springs-based non profit, in its annual report on the sector for 2013. During 2012, the world’s space sector...