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China broke ground on its fourth space center Monday, highlighting the country's soaring space ambitions six years after it sent its first man into orbit. - .6.000 people had to be relocated for the construction

> 6.000 people had to be relocated So what? It's less than 0.0005% of the population...

To right that appalling wrong, here we attempt to explain the apparently erratic seasonal changes in the world of G.R.R.M. A natural explanation for such phenomena is the unique behavior of a circumbinary planet. Thus, by speculating that the planet under scrutiny is orbiting a pair of stars, we utilize the power of numerical three-body dynamics to predict that, unfortunately, it is not possible to predict either the length, or the severity of any coming winter.

Imaging of gas giant orbiting its central star (related to Jai's YGT proposal): With GPI, astronomers image the actual planet--a remarkable feat given that an orbiting world typically appears a million times fainter than its parent star. This is possible because GPI's adaptive optics sharpen the image of the target star by cancelling out the distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere; it then blocks the bright image of the star with a device called a coronagraph, revealing the exoplanet.

such a simple image, such an awesome feat of science and engineering!

This paper introduces a novel deflection approach based on nuclear explosions: the nuclear cycler. The idea is to combine the effectiveness of nuclear explosions with the controllability and redundancy offered by slow push methods within an incremental deflection strategy. The paper will present an extended model for single nuclear stand-off explosions in the proximity of elongated ellipsoidal asteroids, and a family of natural formation orbits that allows the spacecraft to deploy multiple bombs while being shielded by the asteroid during the detonation.

laser link on cubesat!

The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth's biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth's orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of engineering such a migration over a long time period. (via Nina)

interesting stuff ... I like this quote "When a man tells you about the time he planned to put a vegetable garden on Mars, you worry about his mental state. But if that same man has since launched multiple rockets that are actually capable of reaching Mars-sending them into orbit, Bond-style, from a tiny island in the Pacific-you need to find another diagnosis. That's the thing about extreme entrepreneurialism: There's a fine line between madness and genius, and you need a little bit of both to really change the world. All entrepreneurs have an aptitude for risk, but more important than that is their capacity for self-delusion. Indeed, psychological investigations have found that entrepreneurs aren't more risk-tolerant than non-entrepreneurs. They just have an extraordinary ability to believe in their own visions, so much so that they think what they're embarking on isn't really that risky. They're wrong, of course, but without the ability to be so wrong-to willfully ignore all those naysayers and all that evidence to the contrary-no one would possess the necessary audacity to start something radically new."

And thats why we do what we do :) Enjoy!!

and to poison the waters of an amazing performance, here's the relevant(?) copyright law: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/economist-explains-12?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/how_does_copyright_work_in_space_

And in case you wonder, this is *not* the most expensive music video ever made. Also, launching his guitar to the orbit was still far cheaper than the cost of some guitars sold on earth. Where else can this info come from if not http://what-if.xkcd.com/45/

Two aerospace companies are teaming up to launch giant space habitats to orbit, with the first such liftoff targeted for 2020. Bigelow Aerospace will loft its giant, expandable B330 modules - each of which will provide one-third as much usable volume as the entire International Space Station (ISS) - aboard United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rockets, representatives from both companies announced today (April 11).

Time to get out the Fission Fragment Rocket Engine!

Memristor-Based Artificial Neural Networks, huge potential for true, high-power AI

Memristors (for memory purposes - RRAM type) on the pipeline to be launched in orbit on a cubesat http://thewhitonline.com/2016/03/news/nasa-initiative-chooses-rowan-to-launch-satellite/

Combination of the radio occultation method plus change in the orbital plan in order to observe new target (the volcanic outgassing from Io satellite) by passing though the magnetosphere of Jupiter. It poses a challenge in the sensitivity of the electronics. Maybe it is accepted if the risk is low. Idea for the next GTOC challenge maybe? Optimising the cost on the electronics vs the frequency of passages?

Sometime in the last few billion years, disaster struck one of Earth's nearest neighbours. Planetary geologists think there is good evidence that Venus was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect which turned the planet into the boiling hell we see today. A similar catastrophe is almost certain to strike Earth in about 2 billion years, as the Sun increases in luminosity.

the actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.1593 just wondering if their conclusion that the long term solution is to change the orbit of Earth is really the ultimate wisdom ...

Agency wants to send mini robots into space to recycle and reuse antennas from more than 1,300 dormant satellites in geostationary orbit above the earth.

looks like one of these visions of the future form the 60s...