In the news

America's next President, Barack Obama has got plans for NASA. He hopes not only will inspire the world with manned and robotic space exploration, apply the World's most significant space program to take a help tackle climate change, energy independence, and aeronautics research. In achieving this vision, Obama will cooperate with international partners and engage the private sector to amplify NASA's reach. He believes that a revitalized NASA can help America maintain its innovation edge and contribute to American economic growth.

For those who like to hear it from the man himself, why not tune in m in below.



There is currently no organisation in the US Gvernment that oversees a comprehensive and integrated strategy and policy dealing with all aspects of the government's space- related programs. This wasn't always the case, between 1958 and 1973 the National Aeronautics and Space Council oversaw all space activities for four presidents.

The Council was briefly revived from 1989 to 1992, but Barack Obama will re-establish National Aeronautics and Space Council reporting to the president. It will oversee and coordinate civilian, military, commercial and national security space activities undetaken by NASA, the Department of Defense, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Commerce Department, the Transportation Department, and other federal agencies. It promises to solicit public participation, engage the international community, and work toward a 21st century vision of space developing new technologies.

Given the enormous importance of Obama's plans to the International space industry Space Blog will continue this discussion later this week with an insight into Barack Obama's plans for manned spaceflight.

Time Magazine has selected Bundle Protocol testing and the download of an image of the Cape of Good Hope from UK-DMC as one of the ten best inventions of 2008.

In September, a satellite used the new protocol to relay an image of the Cape of Good Hope back to Earth.

The "Orbital Internet" discussed in this award report is enabled by the cooperation around CLEO - a Cisco router in low Earth orbit onboard the Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC) satellite, UK-DMC. Lloyd Wood developed this idea from the CLEO project with the support of Cisco Systems Space team, NASA Glenn Research Center and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd at the University of Surrey.

This is not the first award that those involved with CLEO have won for its pioneering work in breaking the final frontier of Internet domination, which includes the Times Higher Education Supplement award 2006 and Computerworld awards.

For this test the Bundle Protocol was implemented by reusing the ground-based testbed built for CLEO. NASA Glenn originally relied on this testbed for preparing the in-orbit CLEO router for use in the satelite environment, but it is now used to develop code for UK-DMC's onboard computers.

The Cape of Good Hope image was downloaded in these experiments by carrying it in the Bundle Protocol over Saratoga. The Bundle Protocol, developed by the Delay-Tolerant Networking Research Group, is considered a leading candidate for creating the Interplanetary Internet. Saratoga is a fast file transfer protocol for hop-by-hop transfers on privately-owned networks - including the intermittently-connected networks used for delay-tolerant networking.

Find out more about the Internet in Orbit and this work leading to this award on the Bundle Protocol tests page.

JAXA Astronaut Naoko Yamazaki has been selected as a crew member of the Space Shuttle "Atlantis" (STS-131/19A mission).

She is scheduled to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) for about 14 days on the Atlantis in February 2010, or later.

Following this announcement, three JAXA astronauts are now scheduled to go to space. They are Astronaut Koichi Wakata, who is going to stay on the ISS for about three months by STS-119 mission, Astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who will be on the ISS for about six months after flying on the Soyuz (his backup is Astronaut Satoshi Furukawa,) and Astronaut Naoko Yamazaki on the STS 131 mission.

Congratulations to the team from Shrewsbury School who have won the Space Experiment Competition with their proposal for an ionospheric scintillation experiment called POISE. The team beat off competition from 5 other teams of schoolchildren in the UK to develop their experiment with SSTL and fly their entry a small satellite that will be launched by SSTL in 2010.

Shrewsbury School, in Shropshire, beat five other groups from around the UK in the final stage of the competition which was announced at an awards ceremony at the International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow (IAC) today (Friday 3 October).

The competition, launched earlier this year, challenged teams of 14 – 19 year olds to design and build a small, compact satellite instrument. The POISE experiment is expected to measure variations in the ionosphere, which can affect the accuracy and safety of satellite navigation systems, and might also help to provide indications of impending earthquakes.

The POISE team had to overcome significant challenges to design their experiment within the tight constraints of the competition. Their instrument could be no larger than the size of a lunch box, weigh no more than one kilogram and operate on less than one Watt of power.

Ian Pearson, the Minister for Science and Innovation was impressed with the results.

We have some fantastically creative and talented young people in the country. It’s staggering to see the effort and imagination that has been generated by this competition.

The competition has been sponsored by the British National Space Centre (BNSC), a cross-Government organisation that co-ordinates civil space activities in the UK.

Professor Sir Martin Sweeting, founder of SSTL, emphasised the educational potential of the mission:

SSTL was founded by the University of Surrey and we have always had very strong links with academia, so we’re delighted to extend this opportunity to UK schools. I hope that the experiment will encourage more of our young people to take up careers in science and engineering.

Dr David Williams, Director General of BNSC

The UK has a fantastic capability in the space arena and ambitious plans for exciting programmes such as the lunar exploration mission, MoonLITE. We hope this competition will help to inspire the next generation of space scientists who will make those plans a reality.

The judging panel included Professor Colin Pillinger and Keith Mans, the Chief Executive of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

The winning team was announced at IAC by South Korea's first astronaut, Soyeon Yi. She recently returned from a trip to the International Space Station, having been chosen from about 36,000 applicants for the mission.