News

Heading into the first demo flight of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program SpaceX and NASA were both quick to remind people that this was a test program doing something SpaceX had never done before. From the look of today’s launch it seems they needed have worried so much. The first flight of Falcon 9 carrying the Dragon spacecraft to orbit appears to have …

A safe return for the Expedition 25 crew, a status report on the STS-133 mission, enter the Dragon; a newly-licensed reusable spacecraft, space talks with the ISS crew, wind tunnel testing, and it’s all Good when an astronaut goes home sweet home.

NASA funded researchers conducting tests in Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth that are able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. This new find in the field known as Astrobiology has changed our fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.

Mutually assured exclusion (MAE) certainly seems less crazy than mutually assured destruction (MAD) as a space war doctrine, but both could end up poking eyes out and four papers (three space focused) are retracted amid charges of “self-plagiarism” and “bogus authorship” at Queens University plus launch companies beg NASA to “save the space planes.” All that and more, this week in space for Canada.

Legal and military headaches are standing in the way of data-sharing for GPS, remote sensing and other types of Canadian-used space assets, according to several speakers at the Canadian Space Summit on Sunday.

Northern communities will benefit from Canada’s research into plant-based, closed life support systems that are being developed for space, according to Alan Scott, Research and Development Coordinator at COM DEV.

US based Bigelow Aerospace comes to Ottawa to remind our astronauts that they have an alternative ride to orbit and a new place to visit after the shuttle retires. Meanwhile, back in the bureaucracy, our proud Canadian military waits patiently for a new, but not terribly different, space defence policy update and in Saint-Hubert, others prefer to ignore astronauts and businesses to instead focus on …

NASA has just completed its first comprehensive global survey of temperature trends in major lakes including the Great Lakes and have determined Earth’s largest lakes have warmed during the past 25 years as a result of climate change.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) announced today that is has been accepted as a full member of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC). The committee is a forum for the coordination of activities related to the issues of man-made and natural debris in space.

As Canadians bump up their involvement in space-based earth observation, one of the pressing problems looming is how to deorbit those satellites once their missions are completed. This was one of the themes of the Earth Observation track at this past weekends Canadian Space Summit.