SpaceQ Space news and analysis.

At 4:53 p.m. eastern the space shuttle Discovery launched on what is her final mission. It was a launch whose countdown went smoothly until the final few minutes when a range safety command computer malfunctioned, almost postponing the launch a day.

NASA mission managers met yesterday morning and gave space shuttle Discovery a GO for launch today at 4:50 p.m. eastern. The mission is a key one for the International Space Station and for Canada it’s an opportunity to conduct research and bring back experiments from the International Space Station.

Last Thursday the X Prize Foundation announced the final entries in the Google Lunar X Prize and the lone Canadian entry was submitted and approved just before the deadline. The official roster of entered teams now stands at 29 from four continents. They are vying for a total of $30 million in prizes. To win the teams must send a robot to the Moon and …

With the President’s Fiscal Year 2012 Budget proposal, NASA will continue leading a quest to win the future and help the nation innovate, educate and build by working to protect Earth, uncover distant worlds, and expand the frontiers of technology.

See how the European Space Agency’s ATV-2 nicknamed the Johannes Kepler was made. From pieces and parts to mighty spacecraft sitting atop of Ariane 5 launcher. The Johannes Kepler will carry approximately 6.6 tonnes of cargo to the International Space Station on a resupply mission. ESA’s ATV’s are sent on resupply missions approximately every 17 months.

NASA’s Stardust-NExT mission completed its Valentine’s Day date with a comet with its flyby of comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14. The spacecraft’s closest approach came at approximately 11:40 p.m. EST on Feb. 14. An imaging sequence of about eight minutes is expected to yield 72 high-resolution images around the time of closest approach for best-resolution coverage of Tempel 1’s nucleus. At the time of …

The state of the Canadian space sector is seemingly good, with both jobs and revenue up plus Canadian based Neptec Design receiving the prestigious George M. Low Award from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). But the state of our long term American partners is bad and many of the “commercial space” changes proposed by the Obama administration could potentially be rolled back in …

The Neptec Design Group based in Ottawa was one of four recipients of the prestigious annual George M. Low Award presented by NASA and the first non-U.S. company to win the award.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble’s throne. In order to pick up extremely faint infra-red signals from extremely distant stars and galaxies, the JWST has to be extremely cold. Any noise from the IR radiation of the Sun or Earth would make it impossible to see as far into the past as scientists want to. Thus, the JWST has …