This book presents current research in the field of space science. Topics discussed in this compilation include supernovae as probes for dark energy; structure and transport of the Martian surface material; the study for black hole in m-theory; origin of the Saturn rings; space science applications of aerogels; dynamics and disruption mechanisms of asteroids; primordial black holes, formation and evolution; black holes in higher order curvature gravity; scalar potential model of galaxies; the dark energy scale in superconductors and constraints on dark energy and dark matter from supernovae and gamma ray burst data.

Space operations are among the most demanding and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans and will become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations. Will we leave the close proximity of low-Earth orbit, where astronauts have circled since 1972, and explore the solar system, charting a path for the eventual expansion of human civilisation into space? If so, how will we ensure that our exploration delivers the greatest benefit to the nation? Can we explore with reasonable assurances of human safety? Can the nation marshal the resources to embark on the mission? This book explores the nations important decisions on the future of human spaceflight. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

Space transportation is the movement of, or means of moving objects, such as communications and observation satellites, to, from, or in space. Commercial space transportation is carried out by vehicles owned and operated by private companies or organisations. Today, the U.S. is among several countries that offer commercial launch services and comprise at least 25 percent of all launches world-wide. This book focuses on recent trends in the commercial space launch industry, challenges that the FAA faces in overseeing the industry, and emerging issues that will affect the federal role.

Both military and civilian components of space technologies are used for modern countries or nations anxious to develop rapidly as well as to structure their identity as autonomous states. This idea recently drew some major powers to think about means of limitations for others, rather than themselves, based on the strategic advantages provided by the mastering of space systems (launchers and satellites), paving the way for a possible weaponisation of space. This book presents and discusses a new international context for space policies. This book also describes the panorama of a new strategic international environment for space.

This book explores the significant challenges in sustaining and upgrading The Global Positioning System (GPS). The GPS provides positioning, navigation, and timing data to users world-wide, and has become essential to U.S. national security and a key tool in an expanding array of public service and commercial applications at home and abroad. GPS is integrated into nearly every facet of U.S. military operations, and the number of civil users is increasing. Other countries are now developing their own independent global navigation satellite systems that could offer capabilities that are comparable, if not superior to GPS. The U.S. government, which plans to invest more than $5.8 billion from 2009 through 2013 in the GPS space and ground control segments currently under development, provides GPS service free of charge. The Department of Defense (DoD) develops and operates GPS, and an interdepartmental committee manages the U.S. space-based positioning, navigation and timing infrastructure, which includes GPS. This book looks at the global economic and national security importance of GPS, the ongoing GPS modernisation effort and the international efforts to develop new systems.

The idea of human spaceflight beyond Earth's orbit has captivated many Americans for more than half a century. As U.S. space policy has evolved, new opportunities have emerged, and new challenges have arisen. For the past several years, the priorities of NASA have been governed by the Vision for Space Exploration. It directed NASA to focus its efforts on returning humans to the Moon by 2020 and some day sending them to Mars and "worlds beyond." The resulting efforts are now approaching major milestones, such as the end of the space shuttle program, the design review decisions for the new spacecraft intended to replace the shuttle, and decisions about whether to extend the operation of the International Space Station. This book analyses the issues of NASA's future pursuits and interactions with other federal agencies and the growing role of the space industry.

This book explores and assesses the future of NASA which is at a critical juncture. The agency is in the midst of phasing out the Space Shuttle program and beginning another major undertaking, the Constellation program - which will create the next generation of spacecraft for human spaceflight and is expected to cost upward of $230 billion. This massive effort, unparalleled since the transition from the Apollo program to the Shuttle program, presents the agency with myriad complex and interdependent challenges. NASA is taking on this endeavour against a backdrop of growing national government fiscal imbalance and budget deficits that continue to strain all federal agencies' resources. While NASA's budget represents less than 2 percent of the federal government's fiscal discretionary budget, the agency is increasingly being asked to expand its portfolio to support important scientific missions including the study of climate change. Therefore, it is exceedingly important that these resources be managed as effectively and efficiently as possible. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

This book presents a wide spectrum of in-depth analysis detailing the U.S. space program including policy, the space stations, the shuttles and space exploration. The "space age" began on October 4th 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. Some U.S. policymakers, concerned about the USSR's ability to launch a satellite, thought Sputnik might be an indication that the U.S. was trailing behind the USSR in science and technology. The Cold War also led some to perceive the Sputnik launch as a possible precursor to nuclear attack. In response to the "Sputnik moment", the U.S. government undertook several policy actions, including the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the enhancement of research funding, and reformation of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education policy. Also following the "Sputnik moment", a set of fundamental factors gave "importance, urgency, and inevitability to the advancement of space technology". These four factors, discussed in this book, include the compelling need to explore and discover, national defence, prestige and confidence in the U.S. scientific, technological, industrial and military systems and scientific observation and experimentation to add to our knowledge and understanding of the Earth, solar system, and universe.

The successful launches of SpaceShipOne raised the possibility of an emerging U.S. commercial space tourism industry that would make human space travel available to the public. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has responsibility for safety and industry promotion, licenses operations of commercial space launches and launch sites. To allow the industry to grow, Congress prohibited FAA from regulating crew and passenger safety before 2012, except in response to high-risk events. This book evaluates FAA's safety oversight of commercial space launches, response to emerging issues, and challenges in regulating and promoting space tourism and responding to competitive issues affecting the industry. This book also highlights the federal role in commercial space launches and the government's response to emerging industry trends, both domestically and internationally. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

UFOs. Aliens. Strange crop circles. Giant figures scratched in the desert surface along the coast of Peru. The amazing alignment of the pyramids. Strange lines of clouds in the sky. The paranormal is alive and well in the American cultural landscape. In UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens, Donald R. Prothero and Tim Callahan explore why such demonstrably false beliefs thrive despite decades of education and scientific debunking. Employing the ground rules of science and the standards of scientific evidence, Prothero and Callahan discuss a wide range of topics including the reliability of eyewitness testimony, psychological research into why people want to believe in aliens and UFOs, and the role conspiratorial thinking plays in UFO culture. They examine a variety of UFO sightings and describe the standards of evidence used to determine whether UFOs are actual alien spacecraft. Finally, they consider our views of aliens and the strong cultural signals that provide the shapes and behaviors of these beings. While their approach is firmly based in science, Prothero and Callahan also share their personal experiences of Area 51, Roswell, and other legendary sites, creating a narrative that is sure to engross both skeptics and believers.

This book will be the first English on space law written by a Chinese scholar. With the rapid development of space activities in China, many space scientist and lawyers are keen to know Chinese Legal views on policies and laws on space activities. The book discusses new development of space law in view of the rapid development of space commercial activities from a Chinese legal perspective. The topics selected in the book reflect the author's teaching and research in space law at four different universities: Leiden University, Erasmus University Rotterdam, City University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong. Six areas of space law issues have been selected: property rights, space registration and liability regime, launching services, telecommunications services, national space legislation and international space co-operation. All the topics are closely related to current Chinese space legislation and practice. When dealing with the above six issues, the author will first briefly discuss the current rules and practice at the international level, followed by in-depth analysis of Chinese situation. This will be a unique book. Those who are researching on space law and/or in charge of formulating national space policy will be especially interested in the elaboration of Chinese attitude toward space commercialisation and of the current Chinese space policies and laws.

What is life and where can it exist? What searches are being made to identify conditions for life on other worlds? If extraterrestrial inhabited worlds are found, how can we explore them? In this book, two leading astrophysicists provide an engaging account of where we stand in our quest for habitable environments, in the Solar System and beyond. Starting from basic concepts, the narrative builds scientifically, including more in-depth material as boxed additions to the main text. The authors recount fascinating recent discoveries from space missions and observations using ground-based telescopes, of possible life-related artefacts in Martian meteorites, extrasolar planets, and subsurface oceans on Europa, Titan and Enceladus. They also provide a forward look to future missions. This is an exciting, informative read for anyone interested in the search for habitable and inhabited planets, and an excellent primer for students in astrobiology, habitability, planetary science and astronomy.

Space exploration and commercial activity off-world has its skeptics as well as its enthusiasts. What does seem to be clear, however, is that such activity has increased and is set to expand further, and dramatically so, during the present century. This book explores some of the ethical issues which have already started to arise and it explores the prospects for our medium-range future: Can terraforming of other worlds succeed? Would it be defensible? Should there be limits to mining in space? Do lifeless planets have an 'integrity' which we ought to respect? Could indigenous micro-bacteria have any special intrinsic value? Do we have a duty to extend human life? The text then moves onto a treatment of the ethics of sending world-ships on inter-stellar journeys and the unpredictable risks associated with seeding other worlds with rudimentary forms of life. Throughout, the book is as much about our humanity as it is about space. (And here, a shared humanity is not reducible to species membership.) It concludes with an attempt to explore the connection between our belonging to a single home planet and our sense of belonging to a single moral community.

In this book Professor Lubin lays out the fundamental physics and mathematics required to radically alter our capabilities in propulsion to enable extreme high-speed space flight both in our solar system and beyond. The case is made that the only currently viable solution to enable this transformation, including relativistic flight for the first interstellar robotic missions, is using large-scale directed energy. Traditional methods of propulsion are not capable of achieving the speed required for these missions, including fast crewed missions to Mars as well as the many robotic missions desired both in our solar system and to the nearest stars. Humanity has now reached a technological tipping point with the ability to project power over vast distances with transformational implications in a wide variety of areas, from propulsion to beaming power throughout our solar system to planetary defence. In a series of over 60 technical papers, the fundamentals of this transformation are outlined and synthesized in this book, allowing a detailed understanding of the many challenges ahead and a roadmap for human exploration far beyond our solar system. While the road ahead is long and challenging, it provides the path to radically alter humanity's future.Related Link(s)

2020 Space Hipsters Prize for Best Book in Astronomy, Space Exploration, or Space History Come Fly with Us is the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as “payload specialists� came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA’s struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks. While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107.   Purchase the audio edition.

This book is a ricochet against mainstream physics. It sprang out of the idea that outer symmetries of space-time are the same as inner symmetries of matter. In other words, the standard model of physics is a space-time group. This book is about structures and phenomena that are lying hidden underneath the surface of space-time. It begins with a few biographic events, Majoranas legacy, the philosophy of Gerhard Frey and some related anthropological topics which have to do with high energy physics. It continues with a reconstruction of the theorem by Banach and Tarski in Minkowski space. We are making acquaintance with the standard model as a property of space-time. So we are challenging quite unusual actions such as penetration of quarks by a probe. We propose to apply a penetrating function D. Then, measure and basis are connected with the axiom of choice.

On 12th April 1981 a revolutionary new spacecraft blasted off from Florida on her maiden flight. NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia was the most advanced flying machine ever built - the high watermark of post-war aviation development. A direct descendant of the record-breaking X-planes the likes of which Chuck Yeager had tested in the skies over the Mojave Desert, Columbia was a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, capable of flying to space and back before being made ready to fly again. She was the world's first real spaceship. On board were men with the Right Stuff. The Shuttle's Commander, moonwalker John Young, was already a veteran of five spaceflights. Alongside him, Pilot Bob Crippen was making his first, but Crip, taken in by the space agency after the cancellation of a top secret military space station programme in 1969, had worked on the Shuttle's development for a decade. Never before had a crew been so well prepared for their mission. Yet less than an hour after Young and Crippen's spectacular departure from the Cape it was clear that all was not well. Tiles designed to protect Columbia from the blowtorch burn of re-entry were missing from the heatshield. If the damage to their ship was too great the astronauts would be unable to return safely to earth. But neither they nor mission control possessed any way of knowing. Instead, NASA turned to the National Reconnaissance Office, a spy agency hidden deep inside the Pentagon whose very existence was classified. To help, the NRO would attempt something that had never been done before. Success would require skill, pinpoint timing and luck ... Drawing on brand new interviews with astronauts and engineers, archive material and newly declassified documents, Rowland White, bestselling author of Vulcan 607, has pieced together the dramatic untold story of the mission for the first time. Into the Black is a thrilling race against time; a gripping high stakes cold-war story, and a celebration of a beyond the state-of-the-art machine that, hailed as one of the seven new wonders of the world, rekindled our passion for spaceflight. *With a foreword by Astronaut Richard Truly* 'Beautifully researched and written, Into the Black tells the true, complete story of the Space Shuttle better than it's ever been told before.' Colonel Chris Hadfield, former Astronaut and Space Station Commander 'Brilliantly revealed, Into the Black is the finely tuned true story of the first flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Rowland White has magnificently laid bare the unknown dangers and unseen hazards of that first mission ... Once read, not forgotten.' Clive Cussler

Now in paperback, the life and legacy of the much-overlooked yet highly influential Robert Goddard--the brilliant, eccentric, and controversial pioneer of the space age. More famous in his day than Einstein or Edison, the troubled, solitary genius Robert H. Goddard was the American father of rocketry and space flight, launching the world's first liquid-fuel rockets and the first powered vehicles to break the sound barrier. Supported by Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim, he devised the methods that carried men to the moon. Today, no rocket or jet plane can fly without his inventions. Yet Goddard is the "forgotten man" of the Space Age. After the Germans launched the V-2 missiles of World War II, the American government usurped his 214 patents and suppressed his contributions in the name of national security, until it was forced to pay one million dollars for patent infringement. Goddard became famous again; monuments and medals raining upon his memory. But his renewed fame soon faded, and Goddard's pivotal role in launching the Space Age has been largely forgotten--until now.

As NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, many African American leaders protested the billions of dollars used to fund "space joyrides" rather than help tackle poverty, inequality, and discrimination at home. This volume examines such tensions as well as the ways in which NASA's goal of space exploration aligned with the cause of racial equality. It provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.Essays explore how thousands of jobs created during the space race offered new opportunities for minorities in places like Huntsville, Alabama, while at the same time segregation at NASA's satellite tracking station in South Africa led to that facility's closure. Other topics include black skepticism toward NASA's framing of space exploration as "for the benefit of all mankind," NASA's track record in hiring women and minorities, and the efforts of black activists to increase minority access to education that would lead to greater participation in the space program. The volume also addresses how to best find and preserve archival evidence of African American contributions that are missing from narratives of space exploration.NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement offers important lessons from history as today's activists grapple with the distance between social movements like Black Lives Matter and scientific ambitions such as NASA's mission to Mars.

This essential book describes the mathematical formulations and subsequent computer simulations required to accurately project the trajectory of spacecraft and rockets in space, using the formalism of optimal control for minimum-time transfer in general elliptic orbit. The material will aid research students in aerospace engineering, as well as practitioners in the field of spaceflight dynamics, in developing simulation software to carry out trade studies useful in vehicle and mission design. It will teach readers to develop flight software for operational applications in autonomous mode, so to actually transfer space vehicles from one orbit to another. The practical, real-life applications discussed will give readers a clear understanding of the mathematics of orbit transfer, allow them to develop their own operational software to fly missions, and to use the contents as a research tool to carry out even more complex analyses.

Designing a habitat for the lunar surface? You will need to know more than structural engineering. There are the effects of meteoroids, radiation, and low gravity. Then there are the psychological and psychosocial aspects of living in close quarters, in a dangerous environment, far away from home. All these must be considered when the habitat is sized, materials specified, and structure designed. This book provides an overview of various concepts for lunar habitats and structural designs and characterizes the lunar environment - the technical and the nontechnical. The designs take into consideration psychological comfort, structural strength against seismic and thermal activity, as well as internal pressurization and 1/6 g. Also discussed are micrometeoroid modeling, risk and redundancy as well as probability and reliability, with an introduction to analytical tools that can be useful in modeling uncertainties.

Solar activity has become of increasing importance in our modern society, as many aspects of today's technology could be affected by eruptive phenomena associated with solar magnetic variability. State of the art solar instrumentation is revealing the dynamics of the Sun with unprecedented temporal and spatial resolutions. This volume includes recent results in solar physics research presented at the IAU Symposium 327, the first IAU symposium held in Colombia, in the historical city of Cartagena de Indias, one of the oldest in the Americas. Its main scientific goal was to discuss recent results on the processes shaping the structure of the solar atmosphere and driving plasma eruptions and explosive events in our star. Researchers in both theory and observation, who study structure and activity in the solar atmosphere, discuss a wide range of topics in the field.

'Brilliant. You won't find a clearer, more engaging guide to what we know (or would like to know) about the universe and how it is put together' Bill Bryson Celebrated physicist and global bestselling author Paul Davies tells the story of the universe in thirty cosmological conundrums In the constellation of Eridanus there lurks a cosmic mystery. It's as if something has taken a huge bite out of the universe, leaving a super-void. What could be the culprit? A super massive black hole? Another, bigger universe? Or an expanding vacuum bubble, destined to envelop and annihilate everything in existence? Scientists now understand the history of our universe better than the history of our own planet, but they continue to uncover startling new riddles-the hole in the universe being just one. In this electrifying book, award-winning physicist Paul Davies walks us through the puzzles and paradoxes that have preoccupied cosmologists from ancient Greece to the present day. Laying bare the audacious research that has led us to mind-bending solutions, Davies reveals how we might begin to approach the greatest outstanding enigmas of all.

U.S.A.F. Chief of Staff 2013 Professional Reading List Selection Nearly forty years passed between the Apollo moon landings, the grandest accomplishment of a government-run space program, and the Ansari X PRIZE-winning flights of SpaceShipOne, the greatest achievement of a private space program. Now, as we hover on the threshold of commercial spaceflight, authors Chris Dubbs and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom look back at how we got to this point. Their book traces the lives of the individuals who shared the dream that private individuals and private enterprise belong in space. Realizing Tomorrow provides a behind-the-scenes look at the visionaries, the crackpots, the financial schemes, the legal wrangling, the turf battles, and-underpinning the entire drama-the overwhelming desire of ordinary people to visit outer space. A compelling story of the pioneers of commercial spaceflight-and their efforts to open the final frontier to everyone-this book traces the path to private spaceflight even as it offers an instructive, entertaining, and cautionary note about its future.