Finally, China is advancing its moon and space-station program, which likely will have military missions.
He had it easy: His mission was always pretty clear: Save the earth from a space-station-based lunatic bent on replacing humanity with supermodels, and so on.
Even if NASA elects to merge the two remaining test launches, it will still need to spend more money than it was originally planning to verify that Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule are suitable for space-station operations.
"In order to justify it politically, they had to say, 'Well, it's not going to an Earth-orbiting space station, but it could carry the components of an Earth-orbiting space station to space, '" he says.
Since May 2011, the detector -- which is mounted outside the space station -- has been sifting through matter, antimatter and other particles as it circles the Earth, with the data sent to hundreds of scientists on the ground for analysis.
CNN: Space station detector gives first clues to 'dark matter'
Robert Bigelow, a budget hotel-chain mogul, built a life-size space station in his well-guarded Bigelow Aerospace factory in Nevada.
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Tiangong-1 will demonstrate the critical technologies needed by China to build a fully fledged space station - something it has promised to do at the end of the decade.
It was those skills which have turned our once-shiny space station into a steamy green bacteria-funky lung.
So there's a whole lot of details that we can see here from the Space Station -- and observe every day.
WHITEHOUSE: President Obama's call to the International Space Station
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.
On Thursday, December 3, the target launch of the space shuttle Endeavour on an eleven-day International Space Station mission is scheduled at Cape Canaveral.
Despite the worry about the space debris problem, the outlook for the partly-built International Space Station is good.
And a long duration living and working in space is what the Space Station is all about -- to do the research and the science necessary to take us beyond Earth orbit.
WHITEHOUSE: President Obama's call to the International Space Station
Two of the four gyroscopes - part of the space station's pointing and navigating system - were initially shut down but the crew installed a jumper cable to bring up a third gyroscope, leaving the station in a much more stable position, AP says.
After a two-day journey aboard the Soyuz capsule, the crew will dock with the space station, overlapping briefly with the current crew - station commander Mike Fossum of Nasa, Japan's Satoshi Furukawa and Russia's Sergei Volkov - who will then return to earth.
Nasa astronaut Stan Love knows first-hand the difficulties with technology that his colleagues have experienced on the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit.
The spider lived for 100 days on board the International Space Station as part of the YouTube Space Lab challenge, where NASA took suggestions for experiments aboard the International Space Station from 14-18 year olds.
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The one American attempt at a semi-permanent space station Skylab was crewed for a mere six months in the 1970s, whereas Mir has been continuously occupied since its launch.
Usachev has experience dealing with the consequences of a long-term stay in space, having spent two long-duration missions on the retired Russian space station Mir.
With their voyage complete -- and once the space station's hatches open for them, scheduled for soon after midnight -- they'll have plenty of time to get comfy: They are scheduled to remain on the orbiter for about six months before heading home.
Nasa's new Space Launch System (SLS) is a multi-billion-dollar venture to take humans beyond the International Space Station (ISS) and the confines of low-Earth orbit.
In the United States, NASA's space station program manager told reporters Monday that the timing of the rescheduled mission could force the temporary de-manning of the space station later this year.
Paid-for expansion packs are also available, and represent a mix of shortcuts to in-game content (a personal space station to store spare ships, rather than part-exchanging them) and further chapters for those who have finished the story missions.
He'd been having only modest success selling copies of his self-published PCgame, Outpost Kaloki, in which the player becomes a space station manager in a 3-D cartoon world.
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Currently, the Administration is proposing to proceed with progress payments to the Russian Space Agency for the International Space Station, even though it cannot -- or, in any event, will not -- make the certification required by the Iran Nonproliferation Act (one of whose prominent sponsors was Senator Joseph Lieberman) that the Russian agency is not helping Iran with ballistic missile technology.
The crew has been aboard the International Space Station since mid-December.
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.
On December 5, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romaneko, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn will launch from Kazakhstan to the International Space Station, which will give the station a 6-person crew until March, when Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin will leave.
KOROLYOV, Russia (Reuters) -- A Russian space capsule docked with the orbiting station Mir on Monday to allow a joint Russian-French-Slovak crew to embark on what could be the last mission to the aging craft.
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.
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