Father Christmas (aka the ISS) spotted flying over Britain

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The space station can normally only be seen within a few hours either side of sunrise or sunset, as the sun reflects off the space station, illuminating it against the darker sky.

The ISS travels at about 17,000 miles per hour, more than 200 miles above the Earths surface, and at times can be the second-brightest object in the night sky, after the Moon.

Unlike aircraft, it has no flashing lights.

First launched in 1998, the space station is roughly the size of a football field.

According to NASA, the structure in its current form now has more inhabitable room than a six-bedroom house. It has two bathrooms and a gym.

Its current crew comprises two American men, two men and one woman from Russia, and one Italian woman.

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Father Christmas (aka the ISS) spotted flying over Britain

Space station team eager to begin record yearlong flight

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NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are gearing up for launch March 27 to kick off a record one-year stay aboard the International Space Station, an orbital marathon both men say is crucial for planning future flights beyond Earth orbit and, eventually, to Mars.

While four cosmonauts logged flights longer than one year between 1987 and 1999, the upcoming flight will be a first for the international lab complex and the first to focus on the long-term biological effects of the space environment using state-of-the-art medical and scientific research equipment and procedures.

"If we're ever going to go beyond low-Earth orbit for longer periods of time, spaceflight presents a lot of challenges to the human body with regard to bone loss, muscle loss, vision issues that we've recently realized people are having, the effect on your immune system, the effect of radiation on our bodies," Kelly said Thursday during a news conference in Paris. "Understanding those effects are very important.

"If a mission to Mars is going to take a three-year round trip, we need to know better how our body and our physiology performs over durations longer than what we've previously on the space station investigated, which is six months. Perhaps there's a cliff out there with regards to some of these issues that we experience and perhaps there aren't. But we won't know unless we investigate it."

A veteran of three previous space flights, including a shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and a 159-day stay aboard the station in 2010-11, Kelly is the twin brother of Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut who flew four shuttle missions and who is married to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Kornienko also is a station veteran, logging 176 days aboard the outpost in 2010.

Astronaut Scott Kelly, left, and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko strike a pose during training for launch next year on a record year-long mission aboard the International Space Station.

NASA

"The last long-time space mission was on the Mir (space) station and it brought major data for investigations and research about how humans will feel during long-term flights into space," he said. "I hope that our mission will be an opportunity for others who will follow in our footsteps and take space exploration further."

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Space station team eager to begin record yearlong flight

Elon Musk's next trick: Landing a rocket upright on a barge in the middle of the sea

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Ambitious plan: billionaire Elon Musk. Photo: Supplied

And now for Elon Musk's next trick.

The billionaire entrepreneur is on the verge of attempting an audacious manoeuvrethat could make his next space flight notable not just for the takeoff, but for the landing.

Typically rocket boosters have their few minutes in the fiery, 3-2-1 spotlight, propelling the rest of the stages into the great beyond, before petering out and crashing unceremoniously into the sea.

A screen grab from a video a drone shot showing a prototype reusable rocket launch and land itself.

But Musk thinks that ditching one of the most expensive parts of the rocket is an unnecessary waste.

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So SpaceX, his start-up space company, has designed a rocket he hopes will be able to launch, then return to Earth, touching down softly on the bullseye of a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

Musk, the founder of Paypal and Tesla Motors, said that the odds of pulling off such an unprecedented feat "are not great - perhaps 50 per cent at best." But if SpaceX is able to one day stick the landing of the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket with consistency, it would mark a significant advancement for space flight.

Musk's Falcon 9 can launch, but can it land? Photo: AP

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Elon Musk's next trick: Landing a rocket upright on a barge in the middle of the sea

Wonkblog: Elon Musks next trick: Landing a rocket upright on a barge in the middle of the sea

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And now for Elon Musks next trick.

The billionaire entrepreneur is on the verge of attempting an audacious maneuver that could make his next space flight notable not just for the takeoff, but for the landing.

Typically rocket boosters have their few minutes in the fiery, 3-2-1 spotlight, propelling the rest of the stages into the great beyond, before petering out and crashing unceremoniously into the sea.

But Musk thinks that ditching one of the most expensive parts of the rocket is an unnecessary waste.

So SpaceX, his startup space company, has designed a rocket he hopes will be able to launch, then return to Earth, touching down softly on the bullseye of a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

Musk, the founder of Paypal and Tesla Motors, said that the odds of pulling off such an unprecedented feat are not greatperhaps 50 percent at best. But if SpaceX is able to one day stick the landing of the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket with consistency, it would mark a significant advancement for space flight.

For years, Musk has been working on a way to land and reuse rockets. In two previous launches this year, the company completed soft landings in the ocean, briefly hovering over the water before toppling over.

Unfortunately, it sort of sat there for several seconds then tipped over and exploded, Musk said during a forum at MIT in October. Its as tall as a 14-story building. When a 14-story building falls over, its quite a belly flop.

On its next trip to resupply the International Space Station, scheduled for Jan. 6, SpaceX aims to land the rocket on a barge 300 feet long by 170 feet wide, using its engine thrust to slow down from a velocity of about 3,000 mph. In tests, the company has practiced launching the rocket hundreds to thousands of feet into the air and then reeling it back down slowly, as if tethered to kite string before landing square on the landing pad.

But stabilizing such a large rocket coming back from a great distance at high speeds isnt easy like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm, Musk said.

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Playing Elite on the day NASA detailed its mission to Mars

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It was an interesting day to try my hand at virtual reality space flight and fight.

Sitting in a lounge chair in a downtown New York hotel room, with an Oculus Rift headset strapped to my face and high-end flight stick and throttle in my hands, I couldn't help but be reminded of the day's big news from NASA.

I spent the time leading up to this scheduled appointment with the team behind Elite: Dangerous, watching a historic, live press conference from NASA.

It's called Orion, the gathering of administrators and rocket scientists told the world, and if it succeeds it will take people to Mars.If everything works out, if there are no issues and a team can be put together, it would be another six years at least before Earth said goodbye to its intergalactic explorers.

As a fan of science fiction, growing up on Star Trek and Star Wars and Heinlein, it's hard to keep the butterflies away when NASA starts talking about a Mars landing.

I thought about it during my short walk to the hotel to see Elite, a space combat and exploration game built on the premise that a future society splits in two, some sticking around Earth and the rest breaking away to the distant edges of the universe.

When I arrived, I couldn't help but ask David Braben, the director on this game and co-writer of the original title, about the real world news and its timing.

"It's great and exciting and fun," Braben said, launching us into a conversation about the game's astrophysics, the state of our universe and the game's AI-driven procedurally generated universe.

"The night sky is a blizzard of stars," he said. "We have been unbelievable lucky the solar system hasn't had a close encounter with another star, but within another thousand years there will be.

"Systems pass through each other, some of those could cause serious change."

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Playing Elite on the day NASA detailed its mission to Mars

Artifacts Galore On Curiosity SOL 747 Including NASA Obfuscation – Video

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Artifacts Galore On Curiosity SOL 747 Including NASA Obfuscation
I was so busy when these came out I missed making a couple of these videos. There are some amazing things on this picture and really this whole SOL. I invite you to check out the two gigapans...

By: WhatsUpInTheSky37

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Artifacts Galore On Curiosity SOL 747 Including NASA Obfuscation - Video

NASAs Asteroid Retrieval Mission Faces Criticism

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The agencys proposed human trip to a space rock has a bumpy road ahead

Asteroids could be stepping-stones for human expansion into the solar system.

The Obama administration wants to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. Of course, such a mission requires a lot of advance engineering, and as a first step, nasa plans to send astronauts to a small asteroid that would be brought into a stable orbit around the moon. To achieve that mechanical feat, a solar-powered robotic probe is being designed to capture a space rock and slowly push it into place. A target asteroid has yet to be announced, and the robotic space tug has yet to be built, but the parties involved hope to have the rock relocated to the moon's vicinity as soon as 2021. nasa calls this concept the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) and is marshaling resources across the entire agency to support it.

Michele Gates, the agency's program director for ARM, says that its advanced propulsion technology and crew activities would give nasa the capability and experience needed to someday reach Mars. The trip would demonstrate spacecraft rendezvous procedures and establish protocols for sample collection and extravehicular movements. And it would do all of this while keeping astronauts relatively safe, staying sufficiently close to home so that if something went wrong, the crew could potentially make an emergency return to Earth.

ARM's critics are loud and legion, however. In June the prestigious National Research Council issued a report stating that the mission could divert U.S. resources and attention from more worthy space exploration, highlighting parts of ARM as dead ends on the path to Mars. The harshest criticisms have come from asteroid scientists. Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., ridiculed ARM last September while testifying to a congressional committee, saying that the agency's tentative cost estimate of less than $1.25 billion for the concept's robotic component strained credulity.

It doesn't advance anything, Sykes says, and everything that could benefit from it could be benefited far more by other, cheaper, more efficient means.

The mission's detractors miss the point that it represents the nation's best opportunity in the foreseeable future to maintain its momentum in human spaceflight, says Louis Friedman, a space policy expert who helped to conceive ARM.

To this point, planetary scientist Richard Binzel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues that NASA needs to look for more asteroids before it leaps into ARM. A robust asteroid survey, he says, would discover suitable targets for a crewed mission that would not require an expensive orbital relocation. By the time we would tow a tiny rock into lunar orbit, we could be discovering more attractive, larger objects passing through the Earth-moon system that are easy to reach, Binzel notes.

NASA plans to conduct a formal review of the ARM concept in February, and the Obama administration's next budget proposal is expected to request more funding for ARM. But the redirect's fate may have already been sealed by 2014's midterm elections, in which Republicans, who are largely opposed to the mission, took full control of Congress. With this latest blow to nasa's postSpace Shuttle plans for human spaceflight, the agency's astronauts may end up boldly going nowhere for many years to comeregardless of the approach.

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NASAs Asteroid Retrieval Mission Faces Criticism

NASA's plan for an off-world colony

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(CNN) -- Imagine a blimp city floating 30 miles above the scorching surface of Venus -- a home for a team of astronauts studying one of the solar system's most inhospitable planets.

NASA is currently doing just that; floating a concept that could one day see a 30-day manned mission to Earth's closest planetary neighbor.

Eventually, the mission could involve a permanent human presence suspended above the planet.

Deep heat

Also known as the morning star, and named after the goddess of love and beauty because it shone the brightest of the five planets known to ancient astronomers, Venus is a hot, sulphurous, hellish place whose surface has more volcanoes than any other planet in the solar system.

With a mean temperature of 462 degrees Celsius (863 degrees Fahrenheit), an atmospheric pressure 92 times greater than Earth's and a cloud layer of sulphuric acid, even probes to Venus have lasted little more than two hours. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead and its atmospheric pressure is the equivalent of diving a mile underwater.

But above this cauldron of carbon dioxide at an altitude of 50km (30 miles) scientists say the conditions are as close to Earth's as you'll find anywhere in the solar system.

The gravity at this altitude is only slightly lower than that of Earth, its atmospheric pressure is similar and the aerospace provides enough protection from solar radiation to make it no more dangerous than taking a trip to Canada.

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NASA's plan for an off-world colony