Rob Coppinger has been swirling the ESA tea leaves, and concludes that the upcoming ESA/NASA bilateral meeting in Plymouth in June portends good things for UK manned spaceflight, most likely a British addition to the ESA reserve astronaut list.

• UK to get reserve astronaut in ESA corps this June? -- Hyperbola

The Sci-Fi London film festival staged a panel discussion on space colonisation on May 4th. Topics covered included the uniqueness of our planet and whether manned exploration of space is inevitable for the survival of the human race.

Speakers included:

David Ashford, Director of Bristol Spaceplanes. Co-author of the first serious book on space tourism 'Your Spaceflight Manual - How You Could be a Tourist in Space Within Twenty Years', by David Ashford and Patrick Collins.

Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at Greenwich Observatory, specialising in the study of supermassive black holes and the evolution of galaxies. He has 15 years of research including two years at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, home of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

David Kipping, Astronomer based at University College London investigating extra-solar planets, the development of novel detection techniques and astrobiology.

Jerry Stone, has given lectures on space for almost 40 years. He is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, Chairman of the Space Education Council and a Director of the Mars Society UK.

Rocketeer comments: Ack, I wish I'd known about this in advance. I'd have loved to have been on the panel, especially since I know three of the four speakers already! ;-)

(Source: Jeff Foust)

The video below is B-roll footage released by Virgin Galactic media relations on March 29 of a White Knight 2 test flight.

WhiteKnightTwo flight highlights from Jeff Foust on Vimeo.

The latest WK2 test flight on April 20th experienced an anomaly on a touch-and-go takeoff -- during the initial pullup the right tailboom apparently struck the runway. There was no obvious damage to the aircraft and the test flight programme continued. Flight International later claimed that the aircraft appeared to have steering problems after landing, which it ascribed to the vertical stabilising fins being too small for the size of the aircraft.

Scaled Composites released a press statement describing the tailstrike incident, and explained the yaw after landing as due to an "asymmetric idle thrust setting" and not caused by crosswinds, or any issue with the vertical stabilisers.“Only procedural changes are required to ensure we do not experience it again,” the company stated. Scaled went on to criticise the media speculation which appeared, calling it "sufficiently inaccurate and negative" that the press statement was merited. “In the mean time, do be cautious of what you read if it does not come from either our flight test team or our customer. Also, to state the obvious, you should question the motivations of a publication that reports design or flight test information that is based only on speculation.”, the statement concluded.

Update:

• Flight International responds to the Scaled press release
• WK2 and the media -- Mojave Skies
• Image of the tailstrike incident -- Flight International
• Scaled plans WK2 flight to 50000ft by September -- Flight International

(Source: Space.co.uk)

The story of Black Arrow, Britain's satellite launcher. Produced and directed by Joe Myerscough and Matthew Stacy.

Update: The video is also on Youtube:-

Part 1:-

Part 2:-

Part 3:-

Dear Daily Telegraph. Please educate your readers about the concept of pareidolia. Thank you.

This is the second DFA for the Telegraph. Keep it up guys, you're really maintaining your reputation as a "quality" broadsheet!

(Source: Engineering Britain)

Nick Campbell, Managing Editor of Nature magazine will host Nature's evening debate "Racing to the Moon" in King's Place, London on the 11th May.

The discussion will be chaired by BBC News Science Correspondent Christine McGourty.

"Four decades after the first Moon landings, the original space-racers have been joined by China, India, South Korea, even Nigeria. Why do we still need manned missions? Does space exploration need countries to cooperate, or does it benefit from the oxygen of international conflict and mistrust?"

Sir Martin Sweeting will speak as the Director of the Surrey Space Centre and chairman of Surrey Satellite Technology Limited. SSTL was founded at a time when the satellite business was a duopoly between NASA and the Soviet Union and experienced - and influenced - the seismic changes within the industry. During this time his original staff of four has since grown to 300. He says that the new space-rush can be compared to the gold rush in 1880s America.

Only last year SSTL's onboard computer (OBC) was spurred into action to control the Mini-SAR onboard the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter in the search for water-ice on the Moon.

The MoonLITE and MoonRAKER concepts are also under development in a British consortium that includes SSTL and other UK space companies and research facilities.

This is the first of two King's Place summer events organized by the weekly science journal Nature - you can find out more from this link.

(Source: BFI Southbank, courtesy of Hobbyspace)

Simon Faithfull: Gravity Sucks

The Gallery at BFI Southbank, London, SE1
17 July- 6 September 2009
Private view: Thursday 16 July, 6.30-9pm
Admission free

www.bfi.org.uk/gallery

Gravity Sucks brings together, for the first time, works representing all of Simon Faithfull’s quixotic attempts to escape the earth’s gravity. Faithfull’s Escape Vehicles document seven experiments using balloons, insects and rockets to offer the viewer the idea of escaping ‘G’. The early vehicles are heroic failures – rocket chairs explode, flies fail to buzz, and things stay on the ground. Alarmingly, as the series progresses the experiments begin to succeed, until Escape Vehicle no.6 follows the journey of a chair as it travels up into the heavens beneath a weather balloon. This melancholic work transports the viewer to an uninhabitable realm where breathing is impossible and the sky resembles the blackness of space. Gravity Sucks opens at BFI Southbank Gallery on 17 July and runs until 6 September 2009.

About Simon Faithfull
Simon Faithfull has exhibited in numerous exhibitions both in the UK and internationally. Born in 1966, he trained at Reading University and Central St Martins School of Art. He lives in Berlin and London. More details at www.simonfaithfull.org

Gravity Sucks is part of the One Giant Leap season, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landings, which runs at BFI Southbank throughout July 2009.

About BFI Southbank
BFI Southbank (located between the National Theatre and the Royal Festival Hall) has the only London art gallery specifically dedicated to commissioning and showcasing artists’ films and videos and the moving image in its most contemporary forms. There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archival collections, cinemas, films, publications and learning resources are there to inspire you.

Listing details:
BFI Southbank, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XT
Gallery admission free
Exhibition open Tuesday to Sundays (and Bank Holiday Mondays): 11am-8pm
Tel: DAILY INFO: 020 7633 0274 BOX OFFICE: 020 7928 3232
Tube/BR: Waterloo
Website: www.bfi.org.uk/gallery

(Source: University of Leicester press release)

Leicester researchers in international team that has discovered earliest star explosion

The NASA/STFC/ASI Swift satellite has found a gamma-ray burst from a star that died when the Universe was 640 million years old, or less than 5 percent of its present age. The event, dubbed GRB 090423, is the most distant cosmic explosion ever seen and gives astronomers an insight into the early Universe. The international team, led by UK and US astronomers announced the discovery today, 28th April 2009.

“This is the most remote gamma-ray burst ever detected, and also the most distant object ever discovered — by some way.” Said Nial Tanvir, of the University of Leicester.

Dr Andrew Levan, University of Warwick said “At its most basic level this discovery tells us that there were massive stars at this moment in cosmic history, but equally importantly we can use events like this to probe how the universe evolves when it is less than 5 percent of its current age."

"The burst most likely arose from the explosion of a massive star," said Derek Fox at Penn State University, USA. "We're seeing the demise of a star – and probably the birth of a black hole – in one of the Universe's earliest stellar generations."

"Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts," said Swift lead scientist Neil Gehrels at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

At 3:55 a.m. EDT on 23rd April 2009 (08.55am BST), Swift satellite detected a ten-second-long gamma-ray burst of modest brightness. It quickly pivoted to bring its Ultraviolet/Optical and X-Ray telescopes to bear on the burst location. Swift saw a fading afterglow in X-rays but no corresponding glow in visible light.

"That alone suggested this was a very distant object," explained Fox. Beyond a certain distance, the expansion of the universe shifts all optical emission into longer infrared wavelengths. While a star's ultraviolet light could be similarly shifted into the visible region, UV-absorbing hydrogen gas grows thicker at earlier times. "If you look far enough away, you can't see visible light from any object," he noted.

Twenty minutes after the burst, Tanvir and his colleagues detected an infrared source at the Swift position using the STFC’s United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. "Burst afterglows provide us with the most information about the exploded star and its environs," Tanvir said. "But we have to target afterglows quickly because they fade out so fast."

An automated software system called eSTAR (run by University of Exeter astronomers Alasdair Allan and Tim Naylor), links telescopes from around the world. It picked up the gamma-ray burst alert and calculated that UKIRT could observe the right spot in the sky, and sent the telescope detailed instructions as to what was required.

The Director of UKIRT, Professor Gary Davis, said “We have worked hard to implement a rapid-response system for events just such as this. It is rewarding to see it used so spectacularly.”

Shortly after, Fox led an effort to obtain infrared images of the afterglow using the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea. The source appeared in longer-wavelength images, but was absent in an image taken at the shortest wavelength (1 micron). The drop-out corresponded to a burst distance of about 13 billion light-years.

As Fox spread the word about the record distance, telescopes around the world slewed toward GRB 090423 to observe the afterglow before it faded away.

Follow up observations made by two teams reached the same conclusion, using different observatories – the burst was a record-breaker! At the Galileo National Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, a team including Guido Chincarini at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, determined that the afterglow's so-called redshift was 8.2. Tanvir's team measured the same redshift of 8.2 which equates to looking back 13 billion years in time, using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal in Chile.

Gamma-ray bursts are the Universe's most luminous explosions. Most occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As their cores collapse into a black hole or neutron star, gas jets -- driven by processes not fully understood -- punch through the star and blast into space. There, they strike gas previously shed by the star and heat it, which generates short-lived afterglows in other wavelengths.

The previous record holder was a burst with a redshift of 6.7, which places it 180 million light-years closer than GRB 090423.

The UK researchers are supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which also funds the UK contribution to Swift, subscriptions to ESO and Gemini and owns the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). Key parts of the instrumentation on Swift were built at the University of Leicester and University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory. Leicester also houses the UK Swift Science Data Centre which provided the most accurate X-ray location for GRB090423