GSC Update

*Celebrate the 101st anniversary of the first heaver-than-air flight on Wright Brother's Day, December 17th.

*Look up in the night sky in December for the annual Geminids, a bright and active meteor shower which emanates from Castor, the alpha star in the constellation Gemini (hence the name). The meteor showers are expected to peak Monday night (Dec. 13th), and possibly reach an average of two meteors per minute.

*The Cassini spacecraft has already uncovered several new mysteries and photographed new and exciting portions of Saturn. However, on December 24, the Huygens probe will separate from the Cassini spacecraft, and on January 14, it will descend through Titan's atmosphere to the surface, gaining the first peek into the only satellite other than Earth with a Nitrogen based atmosphere. Beneath Titan's opaque atmosphere has long been suspected contain a liquid surface.

*Despite fierce opposition and bi-partisan struggle, Congress voted late November to fully approve NASA's budget for the upcoming year, including a % 6 increase to reach $16.2 billion. This approval for funding, in large part due to the work of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), comes at a time when nearly all "discretionary" funds are being withheld for Homeland Security and the war in Iraq. Key items for this upcoming budget and NASA include:

Deciding the fate of Hubble
the Space Shuttle's return to flight
finishing the ISS
legislation concerning space tourism

Curious about the budget? More about the support and opposition here.

*Fat Guys With Cameras: An analysis of space tourism from The Space Review.

*Fact or Fiction? Test your space knowledge with 10 questions about commonly-misunderstood science and astronomy concepts.

*SpaceShipOne: Time Magazine's Invention of the Year

For solving the problems of suborbital flight and re-entry with ingenious design, for boldly going where NASA now fears to tread and returning without a scratch, but most of all for reigniting the moon-shot-era dream of zero-gravity for everyone, Time magazine has picked SpaceShipOne as it's invention of the year, saluting the privately-built rocket plane as being ingenious in design and an example of "entrepreneurial moxie." Led by maverick aerospace designer, Burt Rutan, SpaceShipOne was the product of his firm, Scaled Composites of Mojave, California.

*Rules have officially been set for what seems to be the next biggest aerospace prize, the $50 million America's Space Prize to find the first commercial orbiting vehicle. A logical step up from the Ansari X Prize, the new competition has spurred on a wave of new legislation and government regulations for new space concepts and structures.

*Space veteran John Young retired officially from NASA's astronaut corps earlier this month. Young flew Gemini 3(1965), Gemini 10 (1966), Apollo 16 (1972), Apollo 10 (1969), the maiden Space Shuttle flight (STS-1 Columbia, 1981), and STS-9 (1983). He retired from his position as safety consultant and Chief of the Astronaut Corps, with 15,100 hours flying time in props, jets, helicopters, rocket jets, and spacecraft, including 835 hours space.

Information from Space.com
"Something Amazing Everyday"
and The Space Review
"essays and commentary about the final frontier"