He declined to say whether this would be the last manned flight to Mir, which has been in space orbit for 13 years.
Once in flight, the plane will disengage from its capsule and return to the ground, while the capsule launches multistage booster rockets to propel it into space orbit or to the International Space Station.
And Richard Branson is planning to take tourists on jaunts into low-orbit space via Virgin Galactic.
He joined Nasa in 1980 and is a veteran of four space shuttle flights, commanding the mission that launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit in 1990.
Proponents predict SpaceX's efforts will boost public and government confidence in others already developing next-generation vehicles and accelerate a new era of commercial entities doing everything from ferrying cargo and astronauts to blasting wealthy space tourists into orbit.
Following a full briefing, the Chinese will make plans for their next manned mission, the Shenzhou-10, as the country steadily makes progress toward its goal of having a permanent space station in orbit between 2020 and 2022.
This year the students had to program their SPHERES to deploy dust clouds that could remove space junk from orbit, dock with another satellite to harvest its parts, and maneuver through an unknown field full of debris.
The work, which is described in the journal Nature, actually draws on observations made by several astronomical facilities, including the Keck and James Clerk Maxwell telescopes in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the Earth.
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However, since Ares I is capable only of reaching low Earth orbit and the space station is the only habitable thing in low Earth orbit, Ares I by itself would be a road to nowhere.
In 1979, NASA's Skylab Space Station fell from orbit, and its debris dropped into the Indian Ocean.
From June onward, there will be pieces of space station going to orbit and getting connected by spacewalking astronauts and cosmonauts through 2002.
Our goal will be to shoot out through the atmosphere, orbit in space, then fall back into the air when the bullet gets behind our head.
Then in 1945 he published a paper proposing the concept of space stations which would orbit the Earth and be able to act as transmitters of radio waves.
In July 2011, AMS operations moved back to CERN, where the AMS team continues monitoring and controlling the experiment 24 hours a day, with the capability to gather data for as long as the space station is in orbit.
ENGADGET: AMS detects excess of positrons, could suggest existence of dark matter
My company, Moon Express, is focused on the next stage of commercial space beyond low Earth orbit, and is already developing early precursor robotic missions in partnership with NASA to explore the Moon and learn how to develop its resources for the benefit of life on Earth.
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If your secret space plane's in orbit and doing its secret thing well enough, why bother bringing it home?
Space Shuttle Discovery blasted into orbit yesterday with a Japanese science lab the size of a school bus in tow.
This marks a big step forward for the commercial space company, which aims to build inexpensive commercial space stations for low Earth orbit.
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So for five years after the shuttle's retirement in 2010, American astronauts will be dependent on Russia to fly them into orbit on their space capsule, Soyuz.
It's not the miniature robotic space shuttle that NASA's planning to send into orbit this month, but another of the space agency's unmanned vehicles has edged closer to its beginning its mission, with the "nearly autonomous" Global Hawk aircraft having completed a key test flight bright and early on April 2nd.
ENGADGET: NASA's unmanned Global Hawk completes key test flight
It will be also be in roughly the same orbit as the Russian space station Mir.
The process began earlier today as Dragon tracked the International Space Station and moved alongside its orbit.
FORBES: SpaceX Dragon Successfully Berths With Space Station
Cable-climbing robots, powered by laser beams shot upward from the ground, or downward from space, would take payloads to orbit.
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.
For NASA, Mr. Musk's partner, the goal is to validate development of private cargo vehicles and eventually, fleets of space taxis to take astronauts into orbit.
Yeomans and colleagues are using telescopes on the ground and in space to nail down the precise orbit of objects that might threaten Earth and predict whether the planet could be hit.
America put a man in space, put a man in orbit, put a man on the moon, created the world's first reusable spacecraft, sent unmanned probes to other planets and led the world in making important scientific discoveries outside the Earth's atmosphere.
The world's best, the Hubble Space Telescope, is as big as a school bus and sits out in orbit, while its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will be roughly the size of a Boeing 737.
Meanwhile, Sherwood sees the space tourism industry growing up around resort hotels in earth orbit, which would be initially marketed to high rollers able to spend a week in space.
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The shuttle did some extraordinary work in low-orbit experiments, the International Space Station, moving cargo.
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