This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – I posted the last one at the beginning of December, but an early Spring update is now in order because March is going to be a very busy month on the station. On Tuesday, the One-Year-Mission of Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornivenko is coming to and end and they will be going back to Earth together with their fellow astronaut Sergey Volkov and then a new crew of three will arrive after slightly more than two weeks – but that is not all, because after that two uncrewed resupply flights, a Progress from Russia and a Cygnus from the US, will arrive in short succession. So there are at least two launches and one landing to watch out for in the next couple of weeks with more coming soon. Here’s the overview of what’s currently going on in space.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. It’s been a bit of a curious week with no really major stuff happening after the big gravitational waves surprise before, but there were even some remnants of that to report. There were also two successful rocket launches in the US and Japan, the Cygnus transporter leaving from the ISS, the announcement of another new space telescope, some more news about the NASA budget, the unveiling of the new SpaceShipTwo and quite a few other tidbits. And I hope to post something else between the space news here soon, so stay tuned for that – meanwhile, here are the news!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a colleection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. It’s the big gravitational waves week! The rumours have been running wild since last Autumn and it turns out they were actually right – LIGO had detected gravitational waves already in mid-September, but it took a while to be really sure that it was the real thing. Other news were somewhat dwarfed by this announcement, but there was actually a lot going on from some rocket launches, to strange reports about a fatal meteorite strike, two postponed launches, North Korea’s satellite going wonky, saying goodbye to Philae and the 2017 NASA budget proposal.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a colleection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. There were no surprising big news this week, but a couple of rocket launches – including one from North Korea-, the passing of Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell, quite a lot of space politics and business and a spacewalk on the ISS. I also included some articles that don’t necessarily qualify as “news”, but are interesting nevertheless like a visit to the USS Enterprise model in the Smithsonian, a cable dilemma at the LHC and newly processed images from the Chinese Moon mission, which I found so fascinating that I just had to choose them as this week’s opening image.

Only last year, CosmoQuest was referred to as an Ex-NASA Citizen Science Project – but now that’s not true anymore because the NASA funding has returned to the tune of $11.5 Million over the next five years, as project director Pamela Gay has recently revealed during an recording of Astronomy Cast.

We already knew since last September that CosmoQuest had won the NASA grant, but only now the full details are slowly beginning to emerge. There is no official press release from CosmoQuest yet – I’ve heard that is still being worked on – but the overall funding amount of $11.5 Million is much, much more than I had originally estimated back in October based on the number of organisations that got the grants. So this is very good news and will allow CosmoQuest to go back to doing proper science instead of barely surviving on a donations-funded shoestring budget and having to worry about funding all the time.

Update: shortly after I published this post, a new article with a job offer was posted on the CosmoQuest blog.

2016 will be an awesome year for CosmoQuest and citizen science in general – it finally looks like the sad times of sequestration and underfunded science education and public outreach are finally coming to an end. And for anyone who doesn’t know what they stumbled into here, I recommend this article about the Origins of CosmoQuest on the project’s own website that explains everything!

First I have to apologize that this is the fourth article of this kind in a row on this blog, but I wanted to take the January off from everything else and I’ve got some other stuff coming up soon. But now – the news! It wasn’t as much of a rollercoaster as last week, but there were still a lot of interesting surprises. This time of year is a bit subdued because of the triple spaceflight tragedies of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia that happened at this time and I linked to an interesting article about Challenger from a journalist’s perspective… but I honestly think that while rememberance is good, we also need to reclaim those occasions and make them positive again. This week’s round of news is again a combination of articles I posted in my suddenly very popular Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community.

It’s only the third week of 2016 and the space and science related news keep getting more exciting all the time – the big headliner this week was the mounting evidence for a Planet Nine in our solar system and the following controversy about it, but there were a number of other notable things happening, including another launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and SpaceX’s thruster hover test of its crewed Dragon capsule and much more. As usual, this is only a very selective overview of what’s going on and there’s always more over in the WSH Crew Community and the Weekly Space Hangout – I’m just collecting the articles I’ve posted over on Google+ in my Space & Astronomy category and some additional links from the community. Now, let’s see what was going on this week…

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!

I’d like to wish all family, friends, regular readers, commenters and all other visitors Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, A Happy New Year or any other Holiday Greetings you prefer! Of course, I like Happy Newtonmas because Isaac Newton was born on December 25th, but I’m very democratic in that respect and let everyone celebrate the the holiday they prefer.

This is my traditional end-of-year posting with a roundup of things I’ve been up to this year – which turned out to be a lot in 2015! It was a very busy, productive and relatively peaceful year for myself and especially good in the hardware department because there have been quite a few technology updates around her. In addition to a new tablet, I also got my first smartphone in 2015 and finally replaced my aging laptop with something well, a bit less aging. This means that working on the websites and other related projects has become much more comfortable recently with less holdups due to slow or breaking down computers and other devices.