This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. For the third week in a row, SpaceX takes the headlines, this time with another successful satellite launch and an even more difficult booster landing on sea. But that was not all SpaceX was up to this week, because there was also a surprising new price chart, superhero spacesuits and some speculation about the Falcon Heavy, so the first four headlines belong to them. Of course there were some other interesting news this week too, so here’s my very personal and subjective selection.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. This week, SpaceX again takes the top spot with the surprisde announcement of an uncrewed Mars mission in just two years! Having shaken up the rocket launch business with their successful landing of the Falcon 9 booster wasn’t enough – now Elon Musk has chosen Mars as a new target, which is, of course, not really a big surprise given his occasional previous remarks about the red planet. Also in the news were the first launch from Russia’s new Vostochny spaceport, lots of politics mainly about the RD-180 rocket engine, a new moon for a dwarf planet and much more. As usual, this is just a highly subjective selection of the space news of this week, but I’ve tried to include everything noteworthy.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. This week, I’m beginning to question the title of this post – do I have too much space and astronomy and not enough science in here? I don’t know and I actually chose the title just because it sounds good, but I actually like to keep the focus on space and astronomy with only a bit of unrelated science thrown in. This week there was nothing major that overshadowed the rest, but a lot of very interesting things have happened, including some very fascinating astronomy, space exploration and even space business news that just kept coming and coming! And as usual you can watch Friday’s Weekly Space Hangout which has some of the news in this article talked about in more detail.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. This week was the 55th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight, the first time humanty had left the Earth – on this occasion, there were two amazing announcements: Bigelow Aerospace and ULA joining forces to bring inflatable habitats into space and Stephen Hawking’s and Yuri Milner’s Project Starshot – the latter one is much more conceptual than the first at the moment, but this could be a turning point in space exploration. Together with the successful sea recovery of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, we surely live in interesting times regarding space and science. Otherwise, it’s been almost all good news across the board this week including the recovery of Kepler – here are the headlines that grabbed my attention.

It’s April 12 again and as every year, I almost forgot about Yuri’s Night again and for that reason I’m simply adapting last year’s post and added a few new links and other information to it. Yuri’s Night is an open, worldwide celebration of humanity’s first spaceflight on April 12th, 1961, which was also the first flight of the Space Shuttle twenty years later. It’s not about Soviet spaceflight or Yuri Gagarin specifically, but actually the fact that this was the beginning of human space exploration itself. It’s not about politics at all, which is especially important nowadays because of the strained relations with Russia, but only a way to raise more public interest about space exploration. This is why Yuri’s Night has also been called the World Space Party, a celebration that humankind had ventured off its home planet for the first time.

The number of events on the Yuri’s Night website is still not back at the all-time record of over 300 in 2013, but has gone up a bit from last year with over 250 star and space parties listed. There are even quite a few in Germany, but like every year, unfortunately nowhere near where I live. But the organizers  leave it up to everbody to make up their own event – throw a star party, just meet somewhere, screen a movie or hold an online event! Everybody can celebrate in their own way, but the organizers would just appreciate if you would let them know what’s going on so they can list it on their website.

As usual, the lack of clear skies prevent me from really celebrating again, because like every year, on April 12 the clouds come rolling in. I’m not aware of any online events happening today apart from the rather curious fact that the Yuri’s Night team has made a commercial partnership of sorts with Disney. But April is also  Global Astronomy Month and  Astronomers without Borders president Mike Simmons was a guest on the Learning Space Hangout last week! He’ll also do a hangout about astrophotography on April 19 and will be a guest on the Weekly Space Hangout on April 22. If you want to do some digital stargazing, I can also recommend the successor to the Virtual Star Party called the Global Star Party, which is happening almost every weekend now and already has 37 episodes to watch in addition to the over 100 past shows from the VSP.

And while I’m not reposting the article with my collection of space-themed reviews over on DVDLog this year, I still recommend having a look at all those movies and television series – and maybe I’ll write a short article about an amazing coincidence involving the recent SpaceX rocket landing and an old soviet space movie later this week. And as always, keep watching my stream on Google+, especially the Space & Astronomy collection to find out more – and you can join us in the WSH Crew Community to keep track of all the space news and hangouts there and on our new website! And keep watching the skies… if you don’t have clouds overhead, you might see six humans in a big space station flying overhead. Some of them are even on Twitter and are posting photos and more from space every day!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. This week, of course, belongs to SpaceX, who not only launched the first Dragon transporter since the failure last year safely into space, but also brought the first stage back and landed it safely on a sea barge. The spacecraft has also arrived at the ISS now, so 2016 suddenly looks very bright again in space exploration after the somewhat worrying events in the last two years. SpaceX may have stolen the show this week, but there were a whole lot of other things happening which have been somewhat overshadowed by the big news. Let’s see what was going on…

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. This week, we had no Weekly Space Hangout, but there was still a lot going on – not all of it good, but most of it interesting. There was a fair share of broken things, most notably the still unknown status of JAXA’s Hitomo satellite and ULA’s sudden problems with the normally very dependable Atlas V workhorse, but on the other side a Progress  freighter made a perfect flight to the ISS and Blue Origin launched and landed its New Shepard for the third time. Plus lots of space exploration and science!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. I didn’t really expect the Easter edition of the news roundup to be that big and at first I wanted to skip a week because of the holidays, but in addition to the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference there were actually a lot of other interesting things happening! Last week we had the Cygnus transporter arriving at the ISS with some drama afterwards about performance problems of the Atlas 5 rocket, more drama about ExoMars followed by debris of its exploded booster, comets buzzing the Earth, lots of fascinating news from the Pluto system courtesy of LPSC, an even closer look at Ceres’ spots and much more. Fasten your setabelts!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community, plus a couple of additional ones that caught my attention. It’s a bit less than last week, but the big events everybody has been waiting for have now happened: ExoMars has successfully launched and a new crew has also gone up to the ISS without problems. There were a few other interesting news, including the now very heated political fight around ULA, new Pluto science, Ceres still puzzling everyone with its spots which now seem to blink and exciting science experiments going up to the ISS on the Cygnus freighter next week.

And next week is also the Lunar and Planetady Science Conference, which will probably produce twice the amount of space and science news than usual. I highly recommend following Pamela Gay and Emily Lakdawalla on Twitter and looking at the #LPSC2016 hashtag is also a good idea! But now to this week’s news…

Yeserday, the first Mars mission to touch down on the red planet since Curiosity in 2012 has launched. The joint ESA and Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter with its Schiaparelli lander is actually only the beginning of a two-part mission that will have a sequel in 2018 with the ExoMars Rover. So why is this so exciting? Originally, ExoMars was supposed to be a combined ESA and NASA mission before the US cancelled it for budget reasons in 2012. ESA saw this coming in late 2011 and had already talked to Roscosmos for a possible collaboration before the bad news actually came and fortunately the project was able to go ahead with Roscosmos as the new partner. ExoMars is really the Mars mission that almost did not happen! I don’t usually write articles like this one much anymore, but I’m making an exception because I’ve written about almost every Mars mission before and I just want to continue that.