Nasa

The Hubble Space Telescope mirror was misground merely because a spacing rod had been turned wrong end up. This time a choice of bad transistors caused loss of the Mars Observer. We had better turn NASA over to the Japanese. L. S. GURNEY Santa Monica

In a pivotal moment for private spaceflight, a towering white rocket lifted a cone-shaped capsule into space early Tuesday on a mission to the International Space Station. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carried the unmanned Dragon capsule into space after a 3:44 a.m. EDT launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., marking the first time a private company has sent a spacecraft to the space station.

A cracked cosmonaut helmet, footsteps in the moon dust, a mysterious flash of light outside a spaceship window — these are some of the images the Weinstein Co. has released from "Apollo 18," a documentary-style sci-fi thriller opening Friday that the studio is marketing as a movie culled from "found footage" from a U.S. space mission. "In 1972, the United States sent two astronauts on a secret mission to the moon," the trailer says. "Despite decades of denial by NASA and the Department of Defense, classified footage of the mission was leaked to the media.

The countdown has begun for SpaceX's historic mission to send a spacecraft into orbit to dock with the International Space Station.SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is due to launch its Falcon 9 rocket early Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in a demonstration for NASA. Officials of the space agency and SpaceX held a news conference Friday at the cape to discuss the mission.

Angry Birds ... in ... spaaaaace! On March 22, our furious red feathered friends are set to go to the moon and beyond in a new game called Angry Birds Space, according to Rovio, the Finnish company that created the Angry Birds empire. "It's one small fling for a bird, one quantum leap for birdkind," the game maker says in an online launch teaser. On its company's blog, Rovio said Angry Birds Space will be an entirely new game, but regular players will still notice lots of familiar elements.

Every year of his presidency, Bill Clinton pursues radical budget slashing to take NASA apart. Amazingly, he finds time to photo-op the launch of the group he has fought so hard to de-fund (Oct. 30). Almost as amazing is that he had the time to do this in between his 102nd and 103rd fund-raisers of the year. JOHN HARDISON Corona

NASA officials confirmed Tuesday that debris revealed by the receding waters of a drought-stricken Texas lake is from the space shuttle Columbia. The object was found by fishermen last week in Lake Nacogdoches after severe drought in the state caused water levels to drop, said Sgt. Greg Sowell of the Nacogdoches Police Department. The space shuttle exploded upon reentering the atmosphere over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members on board. The explosion scattered debris across the eastern portion of the state.

NASA's newest mapping mission, designed to sniff out the dimmest residents of our neighborhood in space, launched successfully this morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Delta II rocket carrying the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft lifted off at 6:09 a.m., Pacific time. About eight minutes later, the 1,485-pound WISE craft entered space. About 52 minutes into the flight, the craft's second-stage rocket ignited again, placing the vehicle into its assigned polar orbit 326 miles above the Earth.

It's been a rough year for NASA. President Obama's proposed budget for 2013 would slash $300 million from the agency's planetary sciences division - a 20% cut from the $1.5 billion it received for 2012. And many Americans are wondering if it makes sense to spend federal dollars on space exploration rather than putting that money to more practical use right here on Earth. But here to tell you that space exploration is both cool and practical is none other than will.i.am, producer and frontman of the super group Black Eyed Peas.

NASA's plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there, if President Obama gets his way. When the White House releases its budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was to return humans to the moon by 2020. The Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to return to the moon.

In August, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory will reach the Red Planet and begin its search for habitats that could have supported life. The next-generation rover, better known by the nickname Curiosity, will pick its way up a mound in the middle of Gale crater and look for evidence that water once flowed on the Martian surface - a condition that is considered a prerequisite for hosting microbial beings. On an expedition to the California desert this month to demonstrate some of the challenges Curiosity will face on Mars, scientists chatted about the upcoming mission.

WASHINGTON - After more than 12 years and at least $100 billion in construction costs, NASA leaders say the International Space Station finally is ready to bloom into the robust orbiting laboratory that the agency envisioned more than two decades ago. "The ISS has now entered its intensive research phase," said Bill Gerstenmaier, head of NASA operations and human exploration, in recent testimony to Congress in defense of the roughly $1.5 billion...

NASA'sfirst hard look at the protoplanet Vesta has given scientists an unprecedented view of its makeup, terrain and history - and revealed that major activity on this ancient rock occurred far more recently than researchers had expected. Images sent back from NASA's trailblazing Dawn spacecraft reveal the full size of a massive crater in the southern hemisphere and indicate that it may have been made just 1 billion years ago, well after Vesta formed more than 4.5 billion years ago, according to one of half a dozen studies published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

A solar flare that sparked a spectacular light show Monday took a convenient left turn. But although Earth is now safe from the impact of a solar storm, some NASA spacecraft are in the line of fire. A solar observatory that monitors space flares; the Mars Science Laboratory, now traveling to Mars with precious cargo, the rover Curiosity; and the Spitzer Space Telescope will feel the effects of the solar storm, said solar astrophysicist Alex Young. "The Spitzer Space Telescope is going to take the biggest impact," Young said Tuesday in an interview with The Times.

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tucked into the hills above Los Angeles, these are heady days: The robot dubbed Curiosity is hurtling toward Mars and is expected to put scientists on their strongest footing yet to determine whether the Red Planet is or ever has been hospitable to life. More than 1,000 of JPL's scientists, engineers and technicians — a full fifth of the lab's workforce — have put in time on the mission. But a dark development has tempered the euphoria. President Obama's $17.7-billion budget request for NASA for the 2013 fiscal year includes a $300-million cut to planetary science, the very work JPL specializes in. That could mean a 20% reduction in NASA's planetary science budget and, at JPL, job losses in the hundreds.

It's been a rough year for NASA. President Obama's proposed budget for 2013 would slash $300 million from the agency's planetary sciences division - a 20% cut from the $1.5 billion it received for 2012. And many Americans are wondering if it makes sense to spend federal dollars on space exploration rather than putting that money to more practical use right here on Earth. But here to tell you that space exploration is both cool and practical is none other than will.i.am, producer and frontman of the super group Black Eyed Peas.

NASA is discovering that perhaps the only thing harder than starting up a program to send humans to the moon is closing one down. President Obama has announced he wants the agency to end its lunar ambitions and begin developing "game-changing" technologies that could one day take humans to Mars. If Congress agrees, NASA must turn off the Constellation program that was supposed to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. But terminating Constellation is no easy feat. To do it, NASA has to navigate a political and financial maze largely of its own making.

NASA reached outside its own organization today and appointed an industry expert as the head of a new safety office to guard against a repetition of the Challenger disaster. George A. Rodney, director of mission success at the Martin-Marietta Orlando Aerospace Co. in Florida, will have charge of all safety, reliability and quality assurance functions in NASA activities.

The smallest planet in the solar system keeps serving up big surprises. Scientists working on the Messenger mission to Mercury have found that the planet has unexpected inner layers and craters with tilted bottoms, and it may have been geologically active far later into its life than previously imagined. In the first of two studies released Wednesday by the journal Science, a team led by MIT geophysicist Maria Zuber scanned the surface of Mercury's northern hemisphere and found the planet's surface to be unusually flat when compared with the terrain of the moon or Mars.

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, the rocket engine manufacturing business in the San Fernando Valley that helped pioneer space exploration in the 1960s, is officially up for sale by its parent company. With headquarters in Canoga Park, Rocketdyne builds rocket engines at a sprawling 47-acre facility near the Westfield Topanga shopping mall. The company is perhaps best known as the maker of the space shuttles' main rocket engines. But it also develops engines for military rockets and missiles.