Space Program

An unmanned Russian supply vehicle that launched this morning to deliver supplies to the International Space Station crashed back to Earth a little over five minutes after launch.

Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is calling on NASA to announce the design for the next generation Space Launch System, or SLS, before more jobs are lost.

It sounds like science-fiction, but it's not.  The European Space Agency is planning a project similar to the plot of the movie Armageddon, in which a group of astronauts is sent out to head off and blow up a huge asteroid that’s hurtling towards Earth.

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, NASA is looking to the private sector to provide the rockets and ships necessary to keep the International Space Station going.  If things go as planned, the first privately owned space capsule will dock at the space station in November.

To say that NASA is excited would be the understatement of the decade.  Aerospace giant Boeing has announced that it will build its seven-seat crew capsule to fit the super reliable Atlas V rocket -- in the hope of carrying astronauts to the International Space Station by the end of 2015.

NASA says a large piece of debris found in Lake Nacogdoches is one of the cryogenic fuel tanks from the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry over East Texas in February of 2003.

Thanks to the ongoing drought, the sinking water level at Lake Nacogdoches has revealed something that could be a long-lost piece of debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.

For nearly 50 years, Houston has been ground zero for the United States space program.  When NASA chose Houston as the location for its manned space flight center in the early '60s, it became known around the world as "Space City".  Sadly, with the demise of the space shuttle program, Houston may not have that distinction for much longer.