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NASA has committed more than $110 million so far to the development of Boeing’s CST-100 capsule for ferrying up to seven astronauts to and from the space station, beginning as early as 2015. Boeing is partnering with “new space” companies such as XCOR Aerospace, Bigelow Aerospace and Space Adventures on its bid. It’s even playing a supporting role on Sierra Nevada’s rival project to build a winged mini-shuttle for NASA’s use.

The Old

The New

Messanger the orbiter arrives at Mercury and take the first color picture.

Image Credit – MSNBC

the pale blue dot

Carl Sagan’s words are always worth remembering: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Each of the stairways has 91 steps, and when you add the platform at the top, the total comes to 365 steps — the number of days in a year. The Maya, of course, were expert calendar makers. The fact that their “long count” calendar comes to an end in 2012 has led some to fear that the world will end. But even present-day Maya say that’s silly. It’s merely the end of a cycle, just as we’ll be ending a calendrical cycle in just a couple of weeks. We’ll see.

Chichen Itza on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula

Stunning close up of the surface of the sun.

Photo Credit: K. Reardon (Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, INAF) IBIS,DST, NSO)