"If the Wright brothers were starting out today they'd never get off the ground, " fumes Ky Michaelson, who spent two years dickering with bureaucrats at an offshoot of the FAA to get a license to launch to 390, 000 feet, well past the boundary zone between the Earth's atmosphere and space.
Fischer is going after Earth-like planets in the habitable zone.
This past December, for example, NASA's Kepler space telescope confirmed its first planet in the habitable zone, a "super Earth" known as Kepler-22b that's thought to be 2.4 times as wide as our planet.
"What's particularly interesting is four new planets - less than twice the size of Earth - that are potentially in the habitable zone, the location around a star where it could potentially have liquid water to sustain life, " Dr Burke told BBC News.
The IMF is also saying that there is a 15 percent chance of a double dip in the U.S. in 2013, a 25 percent chance of a recession in Japan and a guaranteed recession in southern Europe, with an 80 percent chance at least throughout the entire euro zone, the dominant economy on Earth.
The astronomers who will use these telescopes are particularly interested in finding any Earth-like objects in the so-called habitable zone around a star, where temperatures permit water to exist in a liquid state.
Dragon's return to Earth was delayed one day by bad weather in the splashdown zone.
Researchers at the U.K.'s University of East Anglia now are working on a scale they call the "dwell time index" to calculate how much time a planet has orbited in a habitable zone, compared with the time it took life to evolve on Earth.
"Countries could just accommodate the divergence by not putting their clocks forward in the spring, so you'd change your time zone by one hour to bring civil time back into line with the Earth's rotation, " added Dr Whibberley.
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