On Thursday, April 15, President Obama traveled to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to outline his strategy for human spaceflight. Embassy Science Officer Michael Konialian told me that the President’s strategy is a sequence of deep-space missions, with a goal of putting astronauts on Mars. See President’s remarks on space exploration. The President announced an increase in the NASA budget by $6 billion over the next five years, which will allow NASA to do more robotic exploration, run “scouting missions” to Mars, build a new space telescope, and design a new “heavy lift” rocket. President Obama also announced that in the future, NASA will buy “space transportation services” from private firms rather than rely completely on NASA technology and personnel.
Categories: Environment, Science & Technology, Spaceflight Tags: center, exploration, Florida, heavy, kennedy, lift, mars, nasa, obama, space, telescope
I attended a speech at Royal Festival Hall today by Dr. Buzz Aldrin, the NASA astronaut who followed Neil Armstrong out of the “Eagle” spacecraft and down onto the surface of the Moon on July 20, 1969. Dr. Aldrin spoke to a packed house of 2,000 people about his time on the moon, and his efforts to come to grips with the personal and professional effects of that experience. He tells his story in his recent book Magnificent Desolation.
A student team from the Year 9 Science Club at Riddlesdown School in Croydon has won a UK-wide competition in the Space Settlement Design Competition (see http://www.uksdc.org.uk/ for details.) Pretending to be several decades in the future, the students designed a settlement suitable for 10,000 people to live and work on an asteroid. You can read more about it in their student newspaper (PDF link).
Attached is a photo with three of the team members, myself, and Dr. Randall Perry from Imperial College:
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