A little flurry of space-related headlines have blown into my RSS Zeitgeist:
- Next Big Future has screengrabs from (and links to) two reports from the University of Texas looking at the practicality of human exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit before the end of the decade. Lagrange Point habitat, anyone?
- Astrobotic Technology Inc have their eyes on the Google Lunar X Prize, and have signed up with commercial space outfit SpaceX to launch their probe, possibly as soon as December 2013
- Also at Next Big Future (via Tobias Buckell; I must have missed this one bobbing along in the newsriver), Bigelow Aerospace expands its production plant by 185,000 square feet, with plans to expand the current workforce to around ten times the size
- The Space Fence project (previously) is down from three contractors to two, but work now begins on the preliminary systems designs and prototypes (I figure if the projects are only at this stage, my suspicions about the promo images being somewhat speculative are confirmed; not saying they represent an impossibility, but that they’re not images of an existing and functional installation)
- Once Space Fence has spotted a chunk or orbital crud, what then? The Japanese Space Agency proposes using a pre-space technology for scooping them up out of harm’s way: a kilometers-wide fishing net.
Stay tuned for further developments… 🙂