Indeed, political upheavals saw space-flight ambitions revived, then cancelled, twice during the 1970s.
"What we're asking (SpaceX officials) to do is amazing, " William Gerstenmaier, head of NASA's manned space-flight efforts, told reporters recently.
Despite the warm words of the nation's leaders, America's manned space-flight programme has been becalmed in Earth orbit for decades.
Space-flight veterans in the company are well aware of the trial-and-error nature of technology development, but they also know risk is an essential part of innovation.
Richard, his wife, Joan, their two children and his parents were all planning to fly into space whenever Richard launches Virgin Galactic, his commercial space-flight venture.
The heroes of Mr Morton's book are the astronomers who yearn to solve Mars's scientific puzzles, the science-fiction writers who project their politics on to Mars's blank canvas, and the space-flight enthusiasts who dream of Martian colonies.
Aicon opened in London's posh Mayfair district this March in a 4, 000-square-foot space formerly occupied by top-flight contemporary dealer Gagosian.
The Obama Administration has canceled plans it inherited to send astronauts back to the Moon, the Space Shuttle is about to retire, and the only near-term human space flight initiative on the books is a handout to rich California businessmen to update old technology.
And that's a great question because one of the hard things about long-duration space flight is the human body dealing with weightlessness and a lack of gravity.
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"It's a revolution, " he says of private space industry, adding that in the not-so-distant future, space travel could allow for a trans-Atlantic flight in under 20 minutes.
Second, governments should not pick winners or give out extensive subsidies. (Translation: Ethanol is a bad idea, and other existing "renewables, " such as wind power, are unlikely to ever be more than a niche source.) Better to have a small carbon tax to place a price floor for competing technologies, and offer large cash prizes, similar to the X-Prize for private space flight, for specified energy breakthroughs.
This appears to be the mindset of the Air Force regarding its experimental X-37B space plane, the billion-dollar robotic vehicle's orbital flight being extended beyond the 270 days it was initially designed for.
For the Space Shuttle, being a shorter-duration flight of just a couple of weeks, we still train for over one year just specifically on the task that we'll accomplish on our mission.
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As most of you know, The Avengers ended with Tony Stark and his Avenger pals heading off an alien invasion in downtown New York, an attempt which culminated in Tony taking a near-fatal flight into deep space in order to dispose of a nuclear bomb.
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The work was reported in mid-October by Jay Norris, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, at the Fifth Huntsville (Alabama) Gamma-Ray Burst Symposium.
For example, while moving Shenzhou-9 towards the space lab, the flight plan called for five orbital corrections, but the team on the ground in China was able to accomplish it in four.
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That would provide a massive hundred-fold decrease in the cost of space flight.
True to the title of the book, many of these have involved experiments that explore the limits of human ingenuity in realms such as private space flight, brain science and digital knowledge-gathering.
Most impressively, it has helped construct an orbiting laboratory that offers the prospect of long-term research into the effects of space flight, research that can not just improve the health and safety of our astronauts but also of people on Earth.
Those figures include sales from duty- and tax-free stores in three other airports in the country and the duty-free shopping complex in the middle of Bangkok being constructed as a complement to the new airport space (where, without an impending flight or carry-on baggage, shoppers can spend more relaxed time buying duty-free goods, which King Power will have waiting for them at check-in).
"I look at it like, I've leased this space for the next three hours -- or however long the flight is, " Luedeke says.
He said the summit should occur on April 12, 2001 -- the 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic space flight.
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The paradigm shift, which began with SpaceShipOne's first flight into space in June, is away from government-funded space programmes to a dynamic bevy of private efforts.
If there can't be a new manned mission from Earth by then, administrators will have to decide whether to take extensive steps to extend the vehicle's certification for the return flight, proceed on a return flight without certification, or de-man the space station by flying back the remaining crew members within the certification period, he said.
At the time of his space flight, Garriott worked at MMO publishing giant NCSoft on the science-fiction MMO Tabula Rasa.
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Monday's reported launch of the monkey -- who was kept in a "completely sealed" capsule that produces oxygen and absorbs carbon dioxide, with his vital signs recorded throughout the flight -- is part of a larger effort to someday send humans into space, said Iranian Space Agency Director Hamid Fazeli.
The five-segment booster is intended to power the early flight phase of Nasa's proposed Ares 1 launch vehicle - its replacement for the space shuttle.
Many safety improvements had been made for the return to flight, but the STS-114 mission was as much about restoring credibility to the embattled space agency as it was about testing Discovery's new features.
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And if the crew assigned to man the deep-space mission travels up separately to the station, it would also mean all the elements for their long-duration flight could be launched without the complications of ultra-safe abort systems that complicate manned rockets.
Earlier Thursday, new Alpha commander Frank Culbertson and Russian flight engineers Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin beamed down a message marking the one-thousandth day in space for the first component of the space station, the Russian-built Zarya module.
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