(Photo by Nasa, uploaded on Flickr by Jurvetson. See a high resolution version too!)

The Phoenix interplanetary exploration vehicle landed on Mars. My name, David Orban, is on it, together with those of the other members* of Planetary Society. This is of course a rather indirect way of being on Mars, but for the moment I can’t do better, and it is still thrilling to feel part of humanities space exploration efforts!

The photo above is really worth seeing at high resolution: it shows the Phoenix lander descending on the surface, as seen by the Mars Orbiter flying around the planet.

*If you want your name flying into space on other vehicles, you can participate in other programs that the Planetary Society is organizing too!

I attended the speech given by Pete Worden at the International Space Development Conference, which was also held in Second Life on NASA’s Colab island

My question:

Second Life is an inherently Global environment, is NASA taking this into due consideration, as it could draw on the input and expertise of a worldwide participatory audience? This is especially true for Open Source software which is being repeatedly mentioned.

was the first during the Q&A and was relayed to the physical audience after the SL text by the voice of Drew Frobozz, the coordinator of Colab.

Pete confirmed that indeed NASA is welcoming input from all the residents of online worlds, and that he is very much looking forward to be able and start as soon as possible the concrete participation to live missions via telepresence.

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has had his space exploration company operating for some time, but very little was known about it, and the type of launch vehicle that it was developing. A few days ago the website of Blue Origin has had a major update, and posted images of its vertical take-off and landing vehicle, and videos of a test flight.

Bezos realizes how complex the task of developing private spaceflight is, and is explicitly taking a sustainable gradual approach, which is nonetheless spirited, and determined, and the company slogan claims: “Gradatim Ferociter”.

Personal Spaceflight has a detailed report.

The space museum is closed. Not just closed, but in ruin, and abandon. Russia is a leader in the commercialization of its space infrastructure, as well as everything else it has, but in the meantime it forgot to keep an eye on what brought it where it is, in the positive, and the negative.