This was another action-packed week of space, science and a bit of science-fiction news – from flowers in space, the mystery of the gravitational waves, the probably return of a sort of space shuttle (which I like so much that I made it the article image this week), a spacewalk shortened by water in a spacesuit helmet again and, just a short while ago, the successful launch of another Falcon 9 rocket, even though the first stage landing failed this time. Oh, and The Martian got two Golden Globes and was nominated for seven Oscars, to throw in a bit of entertainment!

This article is basically a collection of links I posted this week in my Space & Astronomy collection-slash-category on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community with some updates and added commentary for archiving and those who are not on Google+. The feedback I had over the last five editions was pretty good and I think I can continue doing this on a regular basis. Now let’s have some news….

It’s a brand new year and the space and science news are already piling up – I took a bit of a break over the holidays, but things kept happening and so there are lots of articles to catch up with. The big news had, of course, already happened shortly before Christmas with the successful landing of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, but there was still such a huge amount of interesting stuff that I decided to make the first 2016 edition of my space news roundup into a simple link dump without the usual comments.

The next event to look out for is on January 17 when SpaceX launches another Falcon 9, but this time from Vandenberg in California with a first stage landing attempt on a sea barge. Also, next week Tuesday to Thursday the BBC’s Stargazing Live returns, which I’ve written about over on DVDLog. And now, to the news. Lots of it!

The past one and a half weeks were action-packed with all sorts of amazing happenings, but because there’s so much going on all the time I decided to make this a sort of end-of-year posting covering both weeks leading up to the Christmas holidays. The launch of three astronauts to the International Space Station last week was fantastic, but the absolute highlight was, of course, the successful launch and landing of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on Monday night. There was also a successful launch of the next-generation Progress to the ISS, the passed budget which was good news for NASA and interesting news about Mars and Pluto from the AGU meeting and a few other things. Overall, 2015 was one of the most exciting years for spaceflight and space exploration despite some setbacks earlier – but everything is back on track now and more exciting things are coming next year!

A few notes regarding the winter holidays: the Weekly Space Hangout and most other hangouts are taking a break this and next week but will be back in January – we’ll keep everyone informed in the WSH Crew Google+ Community, where we also keep up with all the news and other things over the winter break. The WSH Crew Website will also be kept up to date and I will also post updates on my social media streams, primarily Google+, if there are any news. You can also follow my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ (which you already do if you have me circled), for all my space and science related postings.  But now on to the last round of news of the year 2015!

The docking of a crewed Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS is usually a fairly boring affair and today it looked like a fairly normal arrival of Timothy Peake, Yuri Malenchenko and Timothy Kopra, who had launch earlier today from Baikonur. But shortly after I had taken the capture seen on the right, the automatic Kurs docking system failed and the spacecraft backed up suddenly to a safety point about 140 meters away from the station. While this is relatively unusual and does not happen very often nowadays, it poses no dangers for the crew because the pilots are extensively trained for both automatic and manual docking. There was not even the slightest confusion when the crew switched to manual mode and although was some urgency to be heard in the radio transmissions, in the end the Soyuz was docked safely by Yuri Malenchenko manually – that means the spaceship was flown by hand!

[Update: the full docking video is now online – watch the Soyuz suddenly reverse at 4:35! There’s also the amazing launch video in which the first stage booster separation was clearly visible.]

This was just another reminder that spaceflight is hard, but if you train astronauts well there is nothing to be afraid of. The Soyuz is now docked to the ISS, but the actualy hatch opening is still more than an hour away – you can watch it live on NASA TV, but on 19:00 GMT there’s also a special Stargazing Live episode on BBC2 hosted by Brian Cox and Dara O Briain with Helen Sharman and Chris Hadfield as guests – see my post over at DVDLog for more about that! I’ll update this article with another paragraph about the hatch opening later this evening.

Update: The three astronauts are now aboard the ISS, but the hatch opening was somewhat delayed – so much, that the Stargazing Live broadcast from the BBC had to run longer because the three new ISS crew members just came into the station when the hour was up! Fortunately the BBC had granted them some overtime so that the short welcoming ceremony including the somewhat awkward calls home were broadcast too. It was a great way to see this almost familiar event, especially with two former astronauts, Helen Sharman and Chris Hadfield narrating in addition to Brian Cox and Dara O Briain. And now… let Expedition 46 commence!

There was such a lot going on this week that it was actually hard to choose from all the news. The big ones were the arrival of the first US cargo spacecraft to the ISS since the failed launches from OrbitalATK and SpaceX and the Soyuz departure, but the bright spots on Ceres, Pluto in colour, Curiosity reaching the sand dunes on Mars, an almost lost Japanese space probe finally reaching Venus  and Germany’s first fusion reactor were equally exciting. This time, I’ve included both stories that were posted in the WSH Crew Community and my G+ Space & Astronomy Collection and I think I will continue this arrangement from now on to get a bit more diversity. If I go on with those posts, I might as well do it right – and there will be even more going on next week! But now on to the news…

It’s been all about rockets and rocket engines this week – there was only one successful launch with the LISA Pathfinder mission, but the one that everybody was waiting for didn’t get off the ground because of bad weatner: OrbitalATK’s Cygnus launch to the ISS was scrubbed three times. [Update: Actually it may still launch – the Sunday attempt is on again at 21:44 UTC… and was successful!] I haven’t posted much else this week due to an unexpected smartphone breakage, but I got a replacement quickly and will be able to do some quick and easy space news article gathering once again. The experiment of resharing selected news articles into my Google+ Space & Astronomy Collection has continued well despite my limited posting and I can’t belive that this collection is now followed by almost 16000 people! But now for a few news articles…

This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – the ISS has been a very busy place in the last few months with a lot of crew changes in September and three spacewalks, but thankfully no major problems have come up so far. In comparison to the crisis a decade ago when the Columbia shuttle disaster had forced the permanent crew down to only two astronauts for quite a while, the ISS operations are today running very smoothly. The loss of three cargo flights in a row might have been inconvenient and uncomfortable, but ultimately was not the catastrophy it could have been. While Expedition 45, which ends in December, has not been much talked about in the media, it has certainly not been an unexciting time – but as usual, the press only likes to talk about the space station when something really goes wrong. Let’s see what’s going on this Winter!

Since the WSH Crew Community was created, I tend to point people for space and science news to it and have not posted much in my social media streams any more. But recently, Google+ had selected my Space & Astronomy Collection as part of the G+ Featured Collections and lots of people started following it, so I started an experiment of re-sharing one news article per day into it. This has had such a good feedback so far even though it was Thanksgiving weekend in the US that I decided to make it a regular feature and collect the linked articles plus a few others at the end of the week into a blog post. Lots of interesting things were happening this week, here are just a few of them. In the future, I will try to share one news article per day from Monday to Friday, a selected video on Saturday and this blog roundup on Sunday. Let’s go!

It’s November 9 again and that means it’s time to almost forget about Carl Sagan Day like almost every year and get reminded by someone on the internet about it. But Carl Sagan’s birthday should be celebrated, especially here in Germany where this day unfortunately has quite a few negative historic connections and it feels like we need to be reminded of something more positive and encouraging. Sagan, who sadly passed away in 1996, has become more popular than ever since last year, when his seminal 1980 science blockbuster documentary Cosmos was re-imagined as Cosmos – A Spacetime Odyssey with Neil deGrasse Tyson, but with Carl still a part of it in spirit. Demystifiying science and invoking a sense of wonder that seems to be all but lost nowadays are still the most important goals every scientist and everyone interested in science should have.

In 2013, Ryan Consell from Mad Art Lab and whole group of people who embody the spirit of Carl Sagan created a wonderful crowdsourced reading of his Pale Blue Dot, which I’ve embedded here again this year.

The history of the space race between the USA and Russia is well documented, but what happened before NASA was founded in 1958 is much less common knowledge. In her new book Breaking the Chains of Gravity, spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel takes up the task of telling the story of the early days of what would ultimately launch humanity into space. On her Vintage Space Blog and her Youtube Channel, she has already often talked about this rarely mentioned era, but Breaking the Chains of Gravity is much more than just a simple collection of blog posts.

The books sticks close to the facts, but as the author mentions in her introductory video, this is not a technical reference manual. Instead, it centers around the people behind the technology, the inventors, engineers and even visionaries that have made spaceflight possible. One of the key figures is, of course, Wernher von Braun, but for Amy Shira Teitel telling just his story was not enough and so she went even further back to the hobby rocketeers in the late 1920s Germany around Max Valier, Herman Oberth and their Society for Space Travel. By necessity, the book is also partly a history of World War II, but the author has wisely kept close to the topic and does not dwell too much on the question of war crimes, although the devastation the V2 rockets were capable of does not go unmentioned.

After the end of WWII, the book shifts gears and tells the parallel stories of the German scientists and engineers around Wernher von Braun arriving in the USA and the efforts of the Americans themselves to successfully build rockets both as weapons and for space exploration. This is also the more well-known story of Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield and Neil Armstrong flying rocket planes to break the sound barrier and almost reaching space, but the equally harrowing tales of flight surgeons John Paul Stapp self-experimenting with deceleration and David Simmons’ high-altitude balloon flights are mentioned more than just in passing. American politics under President Eisenhower also take up a larger part of the book’s second half, which describes in detail the decisions of the US administration that ultimately led to the creation of NASA.

Amy Shira Teitel’s writing style closely resembles her many blog posts, but here it seems even more refined and improved. While she has chosen to omit technical details, her writing is far from dumbed down and actually full of minute details and facts rarely mentioned anywhere else. The narrative successfully avoids being a dry history lesson and instead conveys the author’s enthusiasm for the subject by being engaging and suspenseful, but at the same time not too emotional. The book has only two negative aspects: it ends in 1957 with the creation of NASA and the Russian spaceflight efforts are hardly mentioned at all – but both are entirely understandable and would have warranted a whole second book… which perhaps may be forthcoming in the future.

Breaking the Chains of Gravity has been released in Europe and Asia on October 22 and will be available in the US on January 22 next year. An audiobook version (sadly not read by the author herself) is already out in the US.

This review also appears in the WSH Crew Community and on the WSH Crew Website.