HARTFORD - Florida’s Space Coast, once the center of rocket launches, has lost thousands of jobs.
NASA is still using companies such as Boeing, SpaceX, and others to ferry cargo and astronauts to and from the International Space Station in three to five years. Until then, the space agency will spend tens of millions of dollars per seat on Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
High-profile space exploration is now becoming a commercial venture....
A group of wealthy backers, including Google executives and filmmaker James Cameron, are behind an asteroid-mining idea.
NASA suffers in comparison with its early days when it followed through on a grand vision by national leaders, starting with President John Kennedy, of sending men to the moon, said Olivier L. de Weck, an associate professor of aeronautics, astronautics, and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
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Related: Slow Saturday Special: Sayonara Space Shuttle
WASHINGTON - Asteroids have made people nervous for several decades now, ever since scientists declared that a large object from space smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago and put the kibosh on the Age of Dinosaurs. But now some entrepreneurs and tech tycoons are declaring that there is money in those space rocks....
The use of the word caught my eye.
The idea of extracting resources from asteroids is an old one, bandied about for decades. Any such venture has the challenge of convincing people that it is not a pie-in-the-sky concept.
But this one can boast well-known tech tycoons as backers. The company says investors include Google co-founder Larry Page, Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Google investor K. Ram Shriram, former Microsoft chief software engineer Charles Simonyi, and H. Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate.
Serving as an adviser is James Cameron, film director and deep-sea explorer.
See: Boston Globe Box Office
Diamandis and Anderson crafted the asteroid-mining idea about three years ago after having success with other commercial space ventures, including suborbital flights for space tourists....
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Also see: US space program poised to take next step
Commercial rocket launch is aborted
Private cargo rocket blasts off into space
Houston lawyer seeks to inventory moon particles
Fly Me To the Moon
They have lied about so much I have begun doubting even that, and with good reason.
Updates:
Private supply ship aces pivotal space station test
"Space station docks first privately built craft" New York Times, May 26, 2012
High above northwestern Australia, a robotic arm on the International Space Station grabbed onto a cargo capsule floating 10 meters away.
With that simple act, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of Hawthorne, Calif., or SpaceX, made history as the first private company to send a spacecraft to the space station. The grab - which NASA refers to as a grapple - occurred at 9:56 a.m. Eastern time on Friday.
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NASA studies ‘moon rocks’ from Vegas mogul’s estate
