NASA Jumps into Gaming

Apparently NASA is working on a massively multiplayer online game called Astronaut: Mars, Moon, and Beyond. A demo is avalible at their website.

Top Stories of 2009

Alan Boyle at MSNBC reviews the top space stories of 2009 and allows you to vote for your favorite.

Soyuz Launches for Christmas

The Russian Soyuz rocket launched American, Russian, and Japanese astronauts into space yesterday. These three new astronauts will spend Christmas on the International Space Station joining American Jeff Williams and Russian Maxim Surayev.

NASA Should Learn from Silicon Valley and Russia

Former astronaut Edward Lu says NASA should take a lesson from Silicon Valley and Russia and build smaller highly reliable rockets, like the Soyuz, and launch them as fast as new ideas in the technology world.

EU has lots of Plans, but Little Money

The European Union has plans for a Mars sample return mission and manned launches over the next decade. However, it is difficult to see how they are going to increase the spending on space the required 50% given the current budget deficits in Europe.

World Waits on US Plan

According to John Kelly, the rest of the World is talking a good talk about space, but in reality they are waiting on the US, and more specifically the Obama administration, to decide what we are going to do in space over the next ten years.

Obama Pushes Private Space Ferries

The Obama administration, in one of its few nods to private industry, is asking NASA to fund private companies on the order of $3.5 billion to develop private transport to orbit. It is rumored that they may add $1 billion to NASA's budget begging in October of 2010.

This is good news to companies like SpaceX, who are already set to receive $1.6 billion to develop and test their Falcon 9 rocket under the COTS program.

They are also, not surprisingly, seeking international support in developing rockets to land on the Moon and Mars.

Like the old Vulcan proverb, Only Nixon can go to China...