NASA is looking for support from Virginia legislators for help in education, and other state investment in the space program. Virginia is home to two NASA offices (one in Newport News and one in Northern Virginia), and as such they believe that the Commonwealth has an interest in helping NASA.

NASA claims that the $545 million difference in the budget proposed by President Bush and the US congress will cut the asteroid hunting project. Personally I think that this is amazing insight into how the US budgetary process works. NASA has several projects that have recently peaked popular imagination. One of them is the asteroid hunter, the other is the international space station, and the third is the moon colony project. This week NASA released statements about how the asteroid hunter project and the new orbiter (to resupply the space station) were both going to be pushed back or completely nixed by the budget 'short fall'.

For the first time since WWII Germany is expressing an interest in an independent space project. The current German plan is to send an orbiter to the moon by 2013 to photograph the surface and create a lunar atlas. Germany also plans to send a soil sampler to the moon by 2020. The Lunar Exploration Orbiter project is being underwritten by proposed funding of 300 million Euros.

The project to map the surface of the moon sounds like the Change'I project from China. I believe that a similar project has also been proposed by Japan.

Zero Gravity Corporation will take Stephen Hawking for a weightless voyage. The flight is aboard a modified 727 that lifts up to 30,000 ft before taking a series of short nose dives to produce the effect of Zero-G. The flight normally costs about $3,750.

Virgin Galactic has also offering Hawking a free ride in 2009, courtesy of Richard Branson. And courtesy a $200,000 free ticket.

The next launch of Atlantis has been delayed until at least April, 2007. This may endanger the goal of 5 flights in 2007. The reason for the delay is hail which dented the fuel tank, inflicted 'cosmetic damage' to parts of the wing, and damaged some insulating foam tiles.

According to this article which is only interesting for providing the quote from Larry Page, “We have some people at Google [who] are really trying to build artificial intelligence (AI) and to do it on a large scale…It’s not as far off as people think.”

While the guy from the link sounds frightened, I'm not so worried about the possible implication of Google's servers suddenly demanding that we gas Kurdistan. I'm primarily just interested in what they will do with the technology. If you have ever used Google AdSense, the program that enables a website owner to advertise in the Google search results, you may have seen the related Keywords feature. This feature does a great job of finding words that are really and truly related, not only syntactically, but also in theme to the search word provided. For example if I tell google that I want to advertise for the phrase, "Space Exploration", they will give me related results like "Space Explorers", "Space blah blah", and "Blah blah Exploration" which is what I would expect from a simple computer program. However they will also give results like "Smi2le", which is Timothy Leary's acronym related to space migration. Google evidently is watching the terms that you search for and checking which pages you actually visit. By comparing the two pieces of data with the content of the site you visit google can build an AI system based around the contextual meaning of words - which in my (not very well educated) opinion is among the most difficult aspects of AI. Seen in this respect google has created a constantly evolving neural network that is edited by millions of real human interactions every day.

Panasonic has developed a prototype exoskeleton that uses compressed air to help the wearer move limbs. The device is designed to help people with partial paralysis regain use of a bad limb. It functions by using sensors on the elbow and wrist that control eight compressed air 'muscles'. A picture is available at Cnet

Beginning in 2008, Boeing plans to re-enter the commercial satellite market. They will begin using a modified version of it's 702 spacecraft which they claim is smaller and more flexible than its predecessor.

The Plank Mission is a satelitte based exploration craft that is slated to explore the galaxy for clues to the origin of the Universe. Working from the big bang theory, the Plank Mission satelitte will use large telescopes to measure small changes in temperature caused by fluctuations in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Scientists believe that the accuracy of the telescope used will provide a glimpse into the forces present when the Universe had just been created - as young as 300,000 years after the explosion that God sent from the heavens to unleash matter into the world. Or is that not an accurate picture of the Big Bang theory?

Intel in cooperation with IBM has created a computer chip that delivers a teraflop of performance. That means the chip is able to perform a trillion floating point mathematical operations per second. At the moment, it takes a supercomputer or a computing cluster to achieve that kind of performance. The performance was achieved by figured out a way to put 80 core calculating engines on a single chip. The chip consumes much less power than other similar available methods (62 watts at 3.16 gHz vs 500 kilowatts for 10,000 pentium chips). At the same time the chip contains about 1/3 less transistors than Intel's previous chip; or about 100 million transistors.

COROT has finished it's testing phase with excellent results. With that completed, the satelitte launched by the European Space Agency has begun it mission. COROT has begun looking for new planets around other stars. In order to accomplish this, COROT will be monitoring the amount of light emitted from distant stars. It is thought that when the light received from a star decreases in intensity, the satellite will have detected a planet passing in front of the star. This method of planet detection is thought to improve our chances of detecting smaller planets closer to a star, planets more like Earth, than previously possible.

The New Horizons space probe is approaching Jupiter and will reach it's closest point to the planet on Feb 28th, 2007. The probe will be considered to be 'passing' Jupiter between Jan, 2007 and June, 2007, during which time New Horizons will be making observations of the planet. The main goal in approaching Jupiter is to use the large planet's gravity to accelerate the probe up to 52,000 mph - 9,000 miles per hour faster than it is currently traveling. The probe will then continue on to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons is expected to reach Pluto in July, 2015.

While the New Horizons probe passes Jupiter it will be capturing some images of the planet, especially an are known as the 'little red spot', a small storm located south of Jupiter's 'Great Red Spot'.

Brian Emmet, the guy who one a trip into suborbital space from Oracle, is getting a free ride. Benson Space Co. heard about Brain's trouble with the tax man and offered to hire him as a consultant for the ride. Now the whole trip is a tax write off - take that tax man! At least, now that Brian is using the trip to space for work it seems like it could be a write off, but I suppose he still won the trip and probably has to pay taxes. This is when reporters would probably call people and ask.

Brain will give Benson feedback on the ride into space as a way of improving their own suborbital experience.

Transformational Space Corp and PlanetSpace received a promise for continued consultations, advise, and feedback from NASA regarding their development of spacecraft capable of delivering cargo and crew to the International Space Station. The promise stems for the COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) competition previously sponsored by NASA. SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler were awarded $500 million from that competition in order to pursue their own designs for spacecraft. The COTS competition will be re-opened in 2010, which may give Transformational Space Corp (t/Space) and PlanetSpace a chance to get contracts for re-supplying the space station. It is estimated that those contracts will be lucrative to the tune of several billion dollars.