Word: space
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With the future of the space agency up in the air, NASA can certainly use the good p.r. that will flow from Wednesday's picture-perfect test launch of its Ares I-X prototype rocket, which is being designed to replace the aging space shuttle and ignite a new era in human space exploration. Mission managers took quick advantage of changing weather conditions to blast the rocket through a small hole in upper-level clouds that passed briefly over Launch...
...something an amused NASA spokesman later insisted hadn't occurred in 500 practice runs. It took nine minutes of mostly close-up, viral-video-quality tugging before the dangling sock released, even as engineers debated whether the snafu amounted to a launch-canceling problem. (See pictures from the Mars space lander...
...time in more than 40 years that NASA has tested a prototype of a new rocket system to take passengers beyond Earth orbit. Ares I is part of a family of new rockets in NASA's Constellation program, which was propelled by former President George W. Bush's 2005 space initiative to go to Mars or back to the moon. Ares would be equipped to fill in for the aging space shuttle - which is planned for retirement in 2010, although scheduled shuttle flights are likely to extend into 2011 - on missions to the International Space Station...
Regardless of the success of the $445 million flight test, the significance of the 327-ft. rocket is uncertain. A report delivered to the White House on Oct. 22 from the Human Space Flights Plan Committee said the Constellation program's goals were underfunded. The committee, headed by Norman Augustine, retired chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., concluded that NASA needs another $3 billion a year to pursue meaningful human space exploration beyond low Earth orbit. Facing a $1.4 trillion federal deficit, even NASA's most ardent supporters in Congress, who represent some of the 60,000 jobs associated...
...president of PAWS (the Performing Animal Welfare Society), which will receive the five lions early next year. PAWS currently offers sanctuary, with minimal human contact, for dozens of former performing bears, tigers, elephants and lions in large, fenced-in natural habitats on 2,000-acre reserves. "We provide a space where animals can run and play and rest as they choose," says Derby. "Our goal is for [life at the sanctuary] to be as close as possible to their life in the wild," she tells TIME...