Tag Archives: NASA

In his opening statement at the Subcommittee on Space Hearing on Private Sector Lunar Exploration, Brian Babin (R-Texas), Chair of the Subcommittee said “will space be the next sector to lead economic growth?” His answer, ” I don’t know.” It’s an important question and his answer was right.

While the International Space Station will still be used until at least 2024 what comes next? That discussion has been ongoing within the space community for some time. The use of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for business and research is only going to increase. National space agencies though are looking beyond LEO for the next challenge including cislunar exploration.

This past weekend Ottawa, Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo hosted NASA’s Space Apps Challenge. For Ottawa, this was their first year, for all the cities, it was a chance to get students involved and excited about space. And for the first time, the Canadian Space Agency participated and made its presence felt, which is a good thing.

On December 6, 2016 Space Systems Loral (SSL), a subsidiary of MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. (MDA), was notified by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center that there had been a data breach of their proprietary data on a NASA server. Orbital ATK was responsible. SSL is now suing them, and publicly, it looks bad for Orbital ATK.

NASA appears to have been spared a major cut to its budget according to the NASA 2018 Fiscal Year (FY) Budget Blueprint. The Trump Administration’s FY2018 budget blueprint would see less than a 1% cut to NASA’s budget and is proposing it be set at $19.1 billion. 

Today NASA announced another exciting find in its quest to find exoplanets and habitable worlds. TRAPPIST-1 is an ultracool dwarf star 40 light-years from space and today astronomers announced the discovery of seven Earth-sized planets, three of which are in the star’s habitable zone and could host oceans of surface water.

Everyone knows how critical water is in the daily lives of everyone on our planet. That’s why the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission which will conduct the first-ever global survey of Earth’s surface water is important and why Canada is contributing to the mission.

After passing over North America, a crew member aboard the International Space Station looked back at the coastline and took this photograph of one of the world’s most famous bays. The image shows the upper 54 kilometers (33 miles) of the 220 kilometer-long (140 mile) Bay of Fundy, site of the highest vertical tidal range on the planet.

This past weekend was the 50th anniversary of a three-day 1966 Apollo Lunar Landing Symposium (ALLMS) that took place in Houston the weekend of June 25-27, 1966. It was an important event in the Apollo missions timeline and including prominent Canadians. Now another Canadian, Randy Attwood, current Executive Director of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, has found a home on the NASA Apollo Lunar …

I’m not sure why SpaceNews published the opinion piece After Orlando, NASA-UAE deal gives reason to ponder space partnerships of Danny Bednar, a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at Western University, the day after the Orlando terror attack. I can only surmise it was to pull a Buzzfeed and post something controversial to attract readers. It worked.