andygates

Have a drool over the VSS Enterprise, Virgin Galactic's first SpaceShipTwo. The mothership, Eve, was unveiled some time back; now it's Enterprise's turn. Yes, Enterprise. Don't worry, that tear of pure nerdy joy? I'm wiping away one just the same.

SpaceX have finished putting together their Falcon 9 heavy lifter rocket.  Pics of the biggest new-year rocket here.  Falcon 9 and the booster-wrapped Falcon 9 Heavy are the rockets that are contracted to resupply the ISS (under NASA's COTS programme), so here's hoping the demo launch in a few months goes OK.

Wow: look at the first pictures of planets orbiting regular stars.

Blurgh: Man-flu. Say no more.

Ooh!  Richard and Burt have unveiled White Knight Two, the carrier for their upcoming spaceplane.  Like White Knight, it's a twin-fuselage jobbie that carries the spacecraft slung between the two bodies.  Once it reaches suitable height, it drops the spacecraft which fires up its rocket and scoots off to the edge of space.  The White Knights are conventionally-fueled aircraft; the spacecraft use a hybrid rubber/nitrous rocket; only the encased-rubber part of the rocket is non-reusable.

SpaceShipOne was designed to win the X-Prize, and it did.  SpaceShipTwo will do billionaire joyrides and those long-lusted-after suborbital super-fast transcontinental flights, and should keep Bond villains and futurologists happy for a while.  SpaceShipThree is the truly exciting end of the arc: it is intended to achieve orbit.  Three is the money shot.

Basically I'll just be repeating the hyperbolic enthusiasm so just go to the link.  It's the moon transiting the earth as seen from the Deep Impact comet probe.  The real thing, not a sim.  More detail than the heartbreaking awe/melancholy mashup from the Mars Orbiter.  Go see!

Coolest space news evar.  The shiny chunks of white stuff that Phoenix exposed a few days ago have sublimated away.  That makes them ice, not salt or white rocks.  How exciting is this?  The Phoenix official Twitter said "W00t! Best day ever!"  That's how exciting.

...even works in the vacuum of space! 

Commercial spaceflight is doing everything right.  First it gets massive investment from Beardy Branson - a flyboy with a pot of cash and business acumen, which is more credible than the pots of cash from Doom co-authors and the like.  Then Beardy goes and calls his spaceflight company Virgin Galactic, which you can just imagine seeing in a 2000AD parody poster from the early 90s.  And then the first ship - the production, passenger-carrying sub-orbital Spaceship Two - is named VSS Enterprise. 

You'll get little vital-signs monitors and cameras in your suits.  You can trade in Frequent Flyer miles for a ticket (2 million for the hop, taken up by Alan Watts, a brit engineer who must do quite a bit of flying).  Tickets will be given as prizes for the general public.  Branson himself is breathless about the whole venture.  Burt Rutan's machines are deliciously unorthodox and they work (the White Knight has trumped the Vulcan in my heart, and the shuttlecock configuration of the spacecraft is brilliant).  There's nose art. 

This isn't a nerdgasm, it's geekkake. 

I predict rock videos in space by 2010.  Probably Radiohead or 50-cent.
ravenbait said a while ago that NASA's photos of the Earth from space made a change to people - that they saw the whole Earth for the first time, and they got that "its rather small, and rather fragile, and the only one we've got" awe.  And that that seemed to be fading.  I've been vaguely hoping that Google Earth would have a similar effect, but it doesn't because we're too used to marvels on screen.  It would be nice to hope that once enough people have taken the trip on the Enterprise that they'd seed a return to that whole-Earth vibe.  We could certainly do with it.