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scheduled to be launched to orbit in second half of 2013

Student Satellite is an educational project that university and high school students can participate in

The CubeSat standard for nanosatellites was followed during the engineering of ESTCube-1, resulting in a 10x10x11.35 cm cube, with a volume of 1 liter and a mass of 1.048 kg.

The new abbreviated four-orbit rendezvous with the ISS uses a modified launch and docking profile for the Russian ships

It has been tried successfully with three Progress resupply vehicles, but this is the first time it has been used on a human flight.

In the past, Soyuz manned capsules and Progress supply ships were launched on trajectories that required about two days, or 34 orbits, to reach the ISS.

A commercial asteroid-mining company aiming to launch a crowdfunded space telescope raised more than $200,000 on the first day of its campaign

Planetary Resources, a private venture aiming to mine near-Earth space rocks

announced

The first of NASA's contracted cargo resupply flights to the International Space Station now has its own mission patch, courtesy of the company launching the spacecraft.

The flight, referred to as Commercial Resupply Services-1 (CRS-1), is the first of a dozen resupply flights for which NASA is paying SpaceX $1.6 billion to fly.

The CRS-1 mission patch, which borrows its shape from the Dragon capsule, shows the solar-powered spacecraft grappled by the space station's Canadarm2 robotic arm as it is being brought in to connect with the orbiting outpost's Harmony module

took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build the International Space Station (ISS).

, an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours

his space station was made out of LEGO.

SpaceX engineers were able to trace the high-pressure problem to a valve that controls the flow of nitrogen used to purge the engine before ignition

check valve that allows the nitrogen purge prior to ignition in the Merlin engine was stuck open just before launch

stuck valve allowed “liquid oxygen to flow from the main injector [for the rocket engine itself] into the gas generator injector

then the 15 experiments comprising "Aquarius"

will be among the first payloads delivered to the station on a commercial cargo craft.

competition among students to fly experiments

A record-breaking mission to the International Space Station has triggered another space race back on Earth, with Florida competing against Texas and Puerto Rico for the chance to land a new launchpad for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and its ambitious line of Falcon rockets.

none of the rivals has made public the incentives each is offering, the numbers are certain to be in the millions of dollars.

The stakes are high: hundreds of good-paying jobs at SpaceX and supporting companies that would pop up around its operation, as well as the prestige - at a time when NASA is no longer flying its own rockets - of serving as home to the commercial space industry's most successful startup.

July 14

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency spaceflyer Akihiko Hoshide 

part of the space station's Expedition 32 mission, and is due to stay for about four months.

Japanese resupply ship, the HTV-3 “Kountouri” (White Stork) launched Saturday

at 02:06 UTC.

contains supplies such as food, clothing and equipment for experiments

Space Exploration Technologies says it has signed its first commercial contract for a new rocket that will be more powerful than the one that launched the company's Dragon capsule to the International Space Station last week.

loft a satellite for the communications services company Intelsat, using a Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.

Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world and, historically, second only to the Saturn V rockets that launched the Apollo missions to the moon.

SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule is due to deliver food, supplies and science experiments

SpaceX is one of two companies with NASA contracts for robotic cargo delivery flights (Virginia's Orbital Technologies Corp. is the other), but is the first to actually try a launch

Here's how the robotic mission is expected to play out:

the firm and NASA warn against placing too much importance on one test flight.

flight is part of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program,

The program is aimed at spurring the development of private spacecraft to replace the cargo-carrying capacity of the retired space shuttles.

Glenn in orbit

In 1962, John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft on the first U.S. manned orbital mission. Launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, he completed three-orbits around the earth, at a maximum altitude of approx. 162 miles and an orbital velocity of approx. 17,500 mph. He spotted Perth, Australia, when that city's residents greeted him by switching on their house lights in unison. A four-cent U.S. stamp was put on sale the same day, making it the first U.S. stamp issued on the day of the event it commemorated. Glenn returned to space 36 years later, making 134 more orbits as a crew member of the space shuttle Discovery (29 Oct - 7 Nov 1998) for investigations on space flight and the aging process.

In 1986, the Soviet Union launched into orbit Mir, a new space station. Mir, the Russian word for peace, had six docking ports and special laboratories for scientific research. Weeks later, a veteran crew was sent to man the 56-ft-long and 13.6-ft wide station. The core module provided living quarters for the cosmonauts: galley/table, cooking elements and storage, individual crew cabins and personal hygiene area. They also had a working compartment for monitoring and commanding the core systems supported by an electric power system, thermal control system, computer systems, environmental control and life support, communications and tracking systems. Five additional modules were launched between Mar 1987 and April 1996