KCNA: NORTH KOREA 'SUCCESSFULLY' TESTED SATELLITE ROCKET ENGINE - North Korea stated that it has successfully completed a test of a new satellite rocket engine. Workers' Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun ran a front-page article on Tuesday, local time, that showed what appeared to be the engine test. The newspaper also stated "Comrade Kim Jong Un" provided guidance during the test at the site identified as the Sohae satellite launchpad, according to Yonhap. The Rodong ran nine color photographs of Kim and the engine, and Kim reportedly said North Korea must become a geostationary-satellite state in a few years' time, after conducting several more tests. Kim also said space development is an important project for the Party and on the "national level."   More
(Source: UPI - Sep 21)

CHINA'S FIRST SPACE STATION WILL BURN UP IN LATE 2017 - Officials in China have conceded that Tiangong-1, the nation's first space station, has now settled into a decaying orbit. That's a sanitized, polite way of saying that the 18,753 pound craft is now hurtling towards Earth with no way of controlling its descent. The vessel is expected to begin burning up towards the end of 2017, although there's a couple of caveats that may not music to anyone's ears. Reading between the lines, Popular Mechanics believes that China cannot anticipate where the burn up and re-entry will take place. The thinking goes that most controlled descents are planned to take place over the ocean, where there's little to no risk of harming people. An uncontrolled descent means that any debris that survives re-entry could strike a populated area, and if you've seen Armageddon, you know what that means.   More
(Source: Engadget - Sep 21)

MAPLE GROVE STUDENTS CREATE SATELLITE TO BE LAUNCHED TO SPACE - This is North Dakota's first satellite that is going to be launched into space at the end of December. This small satellite could mean big things for the space industry. Space is hard, failures happen and the costs can be astronomical to think about. Michael and Sean Wegerson of Maple Grove are the co-founders of Open Space Frontier Technologies. They, along with their designer Alex Holland, are making small cube satellites that can hold a small payload to bring experiments in to space.   More
(Source: KARE - Sep 20)

NORTH KOREA'S KIM GUIDES NEW ROCKET ENGINE TEST, CALLS FOR SATELLITE LAUNCH - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised a ground test of a new rocket engine to launch satellites, the North's state media reported on Tuesday, the latest in a rapid succession of missile-related tests this year by the isolated state. Kim asked the scientists and engineers to make "preparations for launching the satellite as soon as possible on the basis of the successful test," the official KCNA news agency said, indicating the North may soon launch another long-range rocket. The test was conducted amid global condemnation of the North's fifth nuclear test earlier this month and a call by the United States, Japan and South Korea this week for greater pressure on Pyongyang over its disregard for United Nations resolutions banning missile and nuclear programs.   More
(Source: Reuters - Sep 20)

ASTONISHING TIME-LAPSE SATELLITE IMAGERY SHOWS RAPID GROWTH OF REFUGEE CAMPS - On Monday, member countries will convene at the United Nations headquarters in New York City for a summit on the global refugee crisis. They will try to agree on a more humane, coordinated response. The crisis has reached unprecedented proportions. There are upward of 65.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. A third of them are in countries other than their own. Ten million of them were born as refugees and remain stateless, which gives a sense of the intractability of many conflicts. International institutions have scrambled to provide food, medical treatment, shelter and safety. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees plays a leading role in setting up camps, both for internally and externally displaced people. Countless other organizations, big and small, lead and bolster that push, depending on the location.   More
(Source: Washington Post - Sep 20)

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE SPACEX TO RETURN TO SPACE? - It's not a rhetorical question -- it might be a question of financial life or death. For SpaceX, it's back to square one -- or more precisely, square zero. A little over three weeks ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket undergoing pre-launch testing at Cape Canaveral exploded on its launch pad. Along with the rocket, and an on-board Israeli satellite, the explosion sent SpaceX's year-long streak of successful launches up in smoke, resetting it to zero. Now the question is: How long will it take SpaceX to return to space? How long to get back to square one?   More
(Source: Motley Fool - Sep 19)

VOTING FROM THE ISS: VIDEO LINK FOR COSMONAUTS, EMAIL FOR ASTRONAUTS - Anatoly Ivanishin has joined a very select club of voters who have voted from space more than once. The only Russian currently on the ISS, who cast his ballot in Sunday’s parliamentary vote, was also on the space station during the last election in 2011. In a televised broadcast, Ivanishin, who has been on the International Space Station since July, publicly declared that he authorized Oleg Kononenko, deputy leader of the Russian cosmonaut squadron, to cast his vote for him. The two cosmonauts were then connected by a private uplink, in which Ivanishin declared his preference. Kononenko placed his paper ballot into a transparent polling box, placed in the middle of Mission Control, located outside of Moscow.   More
(Source: RT - Sep 19)

ATLAS V DELAYS WORLDVIEW-4 LAUNCH FROM VANDENBERG - The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket scrubbed an attempt to conduct a rare commercial launch on Friday, tasked with orbiting the WorldView-4 Earth-imaging satellite in a mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Launch was then expected to take place during a fourteen-minute window on Sunday. However, that attempt has been scrubbed due to wild fires in the area. The launch of WorldView-4 is the tenth commercial launch for the Atlas V rocket, although six of those launches were made more than ten years ago before the rocket was established as a workhorse for United States government customers.   More
(Source: NASASpaceFlight.com - Sep 18)

RUSSIANS DELAY NEXT SPACE STATION CREW LAUNCH - The next launch of a Soyuz spacecraft carrying three space station fliers has been delayed indefinitely after testing at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan revealed an unspecified technical problem, the Russian space agency announced Saturday. Soyuz MS-02 commander Sergey Ryzhikov, flight engineer Andrey Borisenko and NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough had been scheduled for launch from Baikonur on Sept. 23. After a two-day rendezvous, the spacecraft was expected to dock at the International Space Station on Sept. 25. But in a one-sentence announcement on its webpage early Saturday, Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, said the launch had been delayed “for technical reasons after tests at the Baikonur Space Center.”   More
(Source: CBS News - Sep 18)

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