"Is the problem as straightforward as just doing some orbital garbage disposal? What about the historic spacecraft in orbit that represent our incredible technological and social journey into space?"

"By taking the space suit as a topic, then, de Monchaux stakes a claim for architecture as a wider pursuit — one that does not presuppose buildings. In the same period as the Apollo space suit’s production, architecture was undergoing changes of its own. Technical professions like engineering came to develop more and more of what might be thought of as the real machines for living: standardized components, HVAC systems, tempered glass — the real architecture." A good review of my favourite book of last year.

Janet Vertesi on NASA's 2012 funding and its implications. "In each case, NASA initially acted as a partner, only to leave ESA scrambling to make up the costs. This about-face is not only poor diplomacy, it is damaging to America’s long-term interests in space and on the ground."

Alexis Madrigal: "This is the story of one of the old, weird ties between Earth and space." Well worth taking the time to read.

"The London River Park is a proposed floating green space on the Thames that could be ready in time for the Olympics. But is it really a 'public' amenity? Our architecture critic charts the stealthy rise of pseudo-public spaces." Rowan Moore, and a subject that I hope more people will become aware of, especially since "these places had their bluff called by the Occupy movement. Anxious to keep out the tented rebels, Broadgate and Canary Wharf reached for the injunctions that asserted their rights as private landowners. Paternoster Square put up barriers, manned by both police and private security, that jarred with its architectural look of traditional civic values."

"Friday's launch was far from being a routine affair – for on this occasion Soyuz was taking off, not from its usual launch pad in Kazakhstan, but from one that has been built in the Amazonian jungle of French Guiana." On Ariane and Soyuz.

On attempts to talk to Prospero for its fortieth birthday, and the hazards therein (such as figuring out how to, when the group that maintained it has been broken up for most of that time). (Sidenote: Britain is the only country to have developed an independent launch to orbit technology... and then abandoned it.)

"MCC, the spaces, which, equipped with dozen of computers and screens, are the sites deputed to manage the flights, from lift-offs to landings. Let’s have a look to their evolution from the early missions to today." The deferred loading was annoyingly slow for me, and there's not much text to go with the pictures, but still, worth bookmarking, I think.

"In the early stages of the project, Hubble was plagued by technical delays and budgetary problems. Its troubles continued after launch, and a manned rescue mission was sent to fix Hubble's optics at huge expense. Twenty years on, it is hard to overstate the impact that Hubble has had on science, and on the public imagination. Yet today the US government is on the brink of scrapping Nasa's successor to Hubble, the multi-billion dollar James Webb Space Telescope."

"It is quite conceivable that 36,000km will prove the limit of human ambition. It is equally conceivable that the fantasy-made-reality of human space flight will return to fantasy. It is likely that the Space Age is over."

"For a man who has been making political films all his life, Nostalgia for the Light by Patricio Guzmán appears at first to be an aberration: an examination of the strangely beautiful work of astronomers using the mammoth telescopes in the remote highlands of Chile’s Atacama Desert." "But there is another side of the Atacama. Here is where the Pinochet dictatorship quietly established its biggest concentration camp." Sounds fascinating, but sadly I can't make it to either showing.

It looks like William Stout may continue to be dangerous.

"Signals from GPS satellites now help you to call your mother, power your home, and even land your plane – but a cheap plastic box can jam it all." It's interesting how quickly GPS has become part of life- and how easy it is to mess up.

The phenomena of path dependence and lock-in can be illustrated with many examples, but one of the most vivid is the gear we use to launch things into space.

"Project Orion was a space vehicle propulsion system that depended on exploding atomic bombs roughly two hundred feet behind the vehicle. The seeming absurdity of this idea is one of the reasons why Orion failed; yet, many prominent physicists worked on the concept and were convinced that it could be made practical." Speaking of Freeman Dyson, this Michael Flora article is well worth a read.

"“The main point is religious rather than scientific,” [Dyson] writes, yet never acknowledges that this proposition cuts both ways, never seems to recognize the extent to which his own arguments proceed from faith. Environmentalism worships the wisdom of Nature. Dysonism worships the indomitable ingenuity of Man." This is a good read.

"A symbol of Chinese ambition, according to Barack Obama."

"While the US military and government were grappling with the political implications of Sputnik 1, one of the ways in which ordinary people responded was to translate the body of the spacecraft into something familiar and edible.  The humble olive, with the addition of three or four toothpicks to represent antenna, became a symbol of the satellite." It's worth delving into the archives, too.

Coverage of the Flickr Commons in the Observer. "The image is from a collection of photographs, Nasa Commons, that have been put together by Nasa, Flickr and Internet Archive to commemorate 50 years of photographing the space agency's spectacular ventures." (Minor peeve: NASA don't seem to have set the date taken metadata properly. Otherwise, c'est bon.)

"A few weeks ago, the final building block was delivered to the International Space Station, thus completing the first building beyond Earth. Here, one of the architects involved in its construction, charts the saga of the most technically advanced environment ever built"

"Restful Services for Satellites, Created at Science Hack Day 2010 in London"- saves installing my own C-wrapped Python or Ruby library (or the beast that is Perl's Astro::SpaceTrack) and instead letting someone else do the work. Which is nice.

"PyEphem provides scientific-grade astronomical computations for the Python programming language. Given a date and location on the Earth’s surface, it can compute the positions of the Sun and Moon, of the planets and their moons, and of any asteroids, comets, or earth satellites whose orbital elements the user can provide."

Photos by Robert Harrison from his DIY weather balloon edge-of-space rig.

"Robert Harrison used his ingenuity and a collection of cheap parts worth just £500 to take the spectacular shots using a Canon camera which he launched 35km above the planet's surface."

One of the better parts of the quite long Coyote saga, this is a fairly good standalone short story. "Perhaps Dr. Okada was busy helping the others emerge from biostasis. Yet he could hear nothing save for a subliminal electrical hum; no voices, no movement. His next thought was: Something’s wrong."

The first place to look for information on forthcoming aurora spotting opportunities.

"America’s government has no money for its human-spaceflight plans. The private sector has plenty". Coverage of SpaceX and others getting contracts to service the ISS, while NASA's spam-in-a-can seems to be flailing.

"Satellite Visibility displays daily predictions for when satellites may be visible for your current location. It can display a chart of the whole sky, or a more detailed chart showing the path of the the satellite across the sky."

Someone has finally built abovelondon right; twisst sends personalised (based on location) ISS alerts via Twitter DM. It seems to be having teething troubles with API rate limiting, but it's nice to see someone implement this with optimum usefulness.

""Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" And, of course, once you ask the right question, the right answer follows almost automatically." The right answer, obviously (in retrospect), being no. Curiously, the bulk of the interview is about O'Neill's difficulty in getting the idea out.

"Thanks to the KML development efforts of James Stafford, you can use Google Earth's time animation feature to see the orbits of the two satellites from the six minutes before the impact until they meet. The file also includes one hour's worth of their orbital paths for some perspective."

I finally revived the scripts, an embarrassingly long time after a server move. (Lack of SMS did provide something of a disincentive...)

"Kevin Fetter, a veteran satellite observer in Brockville, Ontario, has spotted the lost tool bag using his backyard observatory and published a video of it online." "Fetter used a $900 Celestron Nexstar 102 SLT telescope fitted with a high-resolution camera, which was in turn connected via a networking cable to his computer."

"Dietrich passed the same battery of physical tests as the men chosen by NASA to become America’s first astronauts. But Dietrich [...] never flew in space - indeed, [she was] never allowed to complete [her] training"

Previously at www.collectiveperception.com, this is only sort of ffffound-esque; it's even more selective about posters and has an interesting custom layout/design. It's also good ffffound fodder.

Nostalgia + children's books + art prints = product porn for the ffffound generation (UK subset). If I didn't have a copy of the Book of London I'd have to buy a chunk of its illustrations.

Todo: scrape this into a calendar, then send emails fifty years after launches (so I can look up pictures and post them to ffffound). Mind you, I'm not sure if they'll all be photogenic.

Nice pictures from NASA's Long Duration Exposure Facility, in orbit for five years from 1984.

"Almost a third of all public spending on research is funded by the Ministry of Defence - far more than is spent on research by the National Health Service." From '05, but I doubt things have changed (I'd love more recent figures though)

"The group calculates the programme would amount to some £600m spread over six or seven years (until 2015). In other words, each year would be equal to a little under half of the UK's current annual civil spend on space." Note "civil".

"Matthew Brzezinski and Patrick Wright evoke the isolation of the Soviet Union with a pair of cold war studies, Red Moon Rising and Iron Curtain, says PD Smith"

Looks at other things the Science and Technology Facilities Council might have to deal with. "When you allow for this, and compare to the STFC planned programme, they are about £80M short. This is a real cut."

Joint letter to the Guardian from professors at four of the top ten universities in the world: "The loss of science in an area in which the UK excels would be out of all proportion to the funds saved."

"British astronomers were last night shocked by a sudden funding cut that will prevent them having access to two of the world's most advanced telescopes"

"the STFC, in shaping its programme for the next 3 years and beyond, is planning to withdraw from the Gemini Observatory. In the current financial climate this is one of a range of measures that has become necessary"

"Access to the Gemini telescopes by the UK community is a vital component of the multi-wavelength approach to solving the highest priority questions in astronomy."

"The £3.6bn Skynet project represents the UK's single biggest space venture. ... The cost of the Skynet project has raised eyebrows, not least because it has been financed through a private company with City money."

"The total cost for [UK astronauts on Soyuz] would amount to between £50m and £75m over a five-year period - rather than the £60m a year it would cost to join the European corps."

Subtitled "The war on light pollution", this is a glorious overview of the problems it causes and what we're all missing due to the human-generated glow in our skies. Well worth a read.

A useful alternative to abovelondon; it covers many more cities and gives you much more advance warning, but there's no indication of brightness.

This is going to come across as terribly po-faced, but isn't NASA's real utter waste of money not the unmanned science stuff, but building Shuttles out of dollar bills baked into re-entry tiles?

Probably less popular than the Nighttime (Earth) map that's been tagged by 500+ users so far.