The European Space Agency expects to achieve significant progress with its most important...

Alliant Techsystems has released information about its proposed Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) demonstration programme launcher for space services company PlanetSpace's bid, after PlanetSpace was selected as a finalist by NASA

ATK have officially unveiled their new vehicle, which is targeted at a near-term solution for their COTS partner PlanetSpace, as well as satellite and planetary markets. Unnamed, but known in the industry as Athena III, the three stage vehicle is based on a 2.5 segment Solid Rocket Booster, with an ATK Castor 120 second stage, topped off with an ATK Castor 30 third stage and Orbit Adjust Module (OAM).

It's nice to see that one of the staple plot devices of science fiction is actually true. Apparently, a trip to space can give you superpowers; at least if you're a cockroach.

According to Russian news agency Novosti, baby cockroaches conceived aboard a satellite in September have apparently grown up to be faster and tougher than their terrestrial brethren.

The first creatures ever conceived in space also grew more quickly than ordinary Earth-bred cockroaches.

Could these positive effects be due somehow to the effectively weightless environment during conception, or to a healthy dose of radiation?

The report does not reveal whether any of the 33 new super-roaches have yet attempted to destroy the Earth, or taken to writing free verse.

Nor are we told any details of how the conception took place, but perhaps it's a good thing that the world is denied a full account of free-fall cockroach sex.

Stephen Battersby, New Scientist correspondent

With just over half a month until the launch of shuttle Atlantis on STS-122, her return to a launch posture picks up the pace with a set of Flight Readiness Reviews (FRRs) over the next 10 days. The FRRs will give a final review of flight rationale, following the replacement of ET-125's LH2 Feed-through connector - along with other elements of the shuttle that have been sitting on launch pad 39A since November.

As the associate administrator, Shin will be responsible for managing the agency's aeronautics research portfolio and guiding its strategic direction.

Following a NASA Constellation budget review - which found the program has a short term deficit of $700m - managers have presented a re-aligned development and test flight schedule, in an attempt to protect Orion's debut mission to the ISS in 2015. Among numerous changes, Ares I-Y is to be delayed by a year, Orion's 1-3 are delayed between nine and three months, while Ares V's lunar mission debut with Orion 13 will now be an unmanned fly-by.

The European Space Agency expects to achieve significant progress with its most important...

Lockheed Martin has selected Alliant Techsystems (ATK) to develop the Orion...

NASA will hold a media briefing on Thursday, Jan. 24, at 12:30 p.m. EST, to discuss the agency's Earth science program and preview major activities planned for 2008.

On Friday, Jan. 25, NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale will deliver a keynote address at 8:45 a.m. PST, at the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

Covering 50 years of NASA history, the calendar has been distributed to schools nationwide.

Making someone vanish in New York and appear an instant later in Tokyo is way beyond current technology but just might be possible in the far future, physicists told an audience at MIT attending a preview and panel discussion about the movie Jumper on Wednesday.

Actor Hayden Christensen and director Doug Liman were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, to show scenes from the upcoming movie and to discuss it with physicists Max Tegmark and Edward Farhi.

In the film, a young man played by Christensen discovers he has the ability to instantly teleport himself across the globe. He uses the ability to rob a bank before getting caught up in a war pitting other "jumpers" like himself against a group that wants to kill them. Click on the image below to watch the trailer.



I was expecting the physicists to say that trying to teleport something as complex as a human being would be totally out of the question. So I was surprised when they said they wouldn't rule it out, even if it is way beyond current technology.

Physicists have teleported individual particles of light called photons across distances of more than 3 kilometres, according to Farhi (below, right), who heads MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics, and have also teleported particles of matter such as electrons.

He said that it should not be too difficult to increase the distances to thousands of kilometres or even interstellar distances, but that teleporting something as complicated as a human, as opposed to single particles, would be much more difficult.

"That really is pretty far down the line," he said. "A living creature probably has 1030 [1 followed by 30 zeros] particles in it … and to get all the information about that to some distant location looks really pretty formidable. I cannot see that as something in the reasonable future."

Farhi also pointed out two limitations of this technique, which is called quantum teleportation. One is that it requires particles to be sent ahead of time to the location you want to teleport to. These particles are what take on your essence to reconstruct you in this location when you are teleported. Secondly, even quantum teleportation takes time – the signal that carries the information used to reconstruct you cannot move faster than the speed of light. However, if it were one day possible to teleport a person, down to the quantum state of each of their atoms, he said the teleported person at point B should have exactly the same thoughts and memories as the person whose quantum state was destroyed at point A.

The other physicist on the panel, Max Tegmark (above, left), pointed out another possible way to transport things quickly across space-time. The laws of physics allow for the existence of "wormholes", which are distortions in the fabric of space that can link two distant locations.

If you could build and take such a shortcut, you could go faster than the speed of light and also time travel, Tegmark said. Unfortunately, he says, the trip could be quite gruelling, as wormholes tend to be quite unstable. "It could collapse into a black hole," he said, "which would be kind of a bummer."

Tegmark later asked Christensen how scientists could be more helpful to filmmakers. "Watch Jumper, get inspired by it, and get to work and figure [teleportation] out," he replied.

Given Christensen's previous role in the Star Wars series, the physicists were also asked to compare the scientific realism of that series with that of Jumper. "I would guess that you would have a light sabre weapon before you will teleport a person," Farhi said. Tegmark wondered how one would build a light sabre: "The only hard part about the light sabre is getting the laser beam to stop."

A few clips of Jumper were shown. I wasn't expecting anything great, because I had not been impressed by the trailer, which seemed higher on enthusiasm than impact. But the scenes we saw developed the story more and did a better job of drawing me in, even if they still seemed a little cheesy in places.

I have my doubts about whether teleportation of people will ever become a reality. The speed of light is pretty fast, and as Tegmark said, if you don't want to go faster than that, there are easier ways to travel, using vehicles propelled by the annihilation of matter with antimatter, for example.

Having said that, I don't have a problem with a far-fetched premise if it makes for an enjoyable movie. I'm hoping Jumper will take the teleportation idea in interesting directions, but that remains to be seen.

David Shiga, online reporter (Images: Maggie McKee)

Thursday's Program Requirements Control Board (PRCB) meeting has been presented with documentation that adds confidence to the initial findings of a "smoking gun" during testing of ET-125's removed external LH2 Feed-through connector. At the same time, plans are being put into place to use a special grease gun on the problematic starboard SARJ (Solar Alpha Rotary Joint) on the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA is developing a lunar positioning system satellite constellation that would enable its Altair...

Preparations for testing the final configuration of Europe's Galileo navigation satellites have been boosted by the European Space Agency's announcement...

The official decision on the future of Atlantis has finally been made, as she avoids early retirement in 2008 - gaining STS-128 and STS-131 in the process via new planning documentation. Atlantis' flagship mission - STS-125's trip to service the Hubble Space Telescope - has been delayed by one month, to September 5, as the bulk of the manifest moves to the right by around 30 days, due to the slip of STS-122 to February 7.

High school students were challenged to create concepts that could accelerate the personal spaceflight industry.

SOFIA has passed a significant mission milestone with the completion of the first phase of experimental flight tests, which confirmed the structural integrity and performance of the modified 747SP aircraft.

Sea Launch have finally returned to flight, with the lift-off of their Zenit-3SL launch vehicle, carrying the Thuraya 3 telecommunications satellite for the United Arab Emirates. Launch was at 11:49am GMT, with the satellite successsfully placed into its desired orbit. NASASpaceflight.com covered the launch as a live event, with extensive background, live updates, images and a free launch video - available now - on the links below (read more).