Anyone with a cool $4 million and change might consider doing what 43 other people have done, and sign up for an orbital space vacation in 2012 with Galactic Suite Space Resort. The Barcelona-based company plans to open the first space hotel if all goes according to plan.
Space customers would spend three nights in their orbital pod room, where they could crawl around like Spiderman (or Venom) in Velcro suits. Reuters reports that guests would also enjoy an eight-week training course set on a tropical island.
The space hotel, which PopSci covered when it was first announced in 2007, would start out as a single pod capable of holding four guests and two pilots. But critics remain dubious — just as Gregory Mone was in our 2007 article — that the company can meet its scheduled launch date.
Still, the price tag falls far below the $35 million paid by first repeat space tourist Charles Simonyi, or the same higher amount required to book an orbital vacation aboard a surplus Soviet-era military spacecraft.
Hopeful customers might also look forward to Bigelow Aerospace's long-planned inflatable space hotel. But the space hotel visionary behind that company seems a bit busy also helping out NASA at the moment.
Hubble's awesome look at a black dot of nothingness in the sky
Here’s an excellent high definition video on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field images, with a 3D simulation that flies you through Hubble’s most awe-inspiring photographs.
The Deep Field images were created by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope for several days at a tiny patch of apparently empty sky — “empty” sky that turned out to be full of thousands and thousands of galaxies, each one containing hundreds of billions of stars. The light collected by the Hubble traveled for 13 billion years to reach the telescope’s CCD. It’s a snapshot of the universe when it was only 500 million years old.
First images of Apollo 14 lunar module descent stages returned by NASA's lunar orbiter
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The imaging system on board NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) recently had its first of many opportunities to photograph the Apollo landing sites. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) imaged five of the six Apollo sites with the narrow angle cameras (NACs) between July 11 and 15, within days of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.
The early images obtained by LROC, operated by Arizona State University Professor Mark Robinson, show the lunar module descent stages left behind by the departing astronauts. Their locations are made evident by their long shadows, which result from a low sun angle at the time of collection.
"In a three-day period we were able to image five of the six Apollo sites – the LROC team anxiously awaited each image," says LROC Principal Investigator Mark Robinson, professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "Of course we were very interested to get our first peek at the lunar module descent stages just for the thrill – and to see how well the cameras had come into focus."
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Compared to the other landing site images, the image of the Apollo 14 site revealed additional details. The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP), a set of scientific instruments placed by the astronauts at the landing site, is discernable, as are the faint trails between the descent stage and ALSEP left by the astronauts' footprints.
