Some people clearly have way too much time on their hands with this nifty website about an orbiting banana. For slightly more sensible stuff you can always find plenty of great links at Hobbyspace.com. And the ever so slightly right wing blog Transterrestrial Musings gets even more serious with stuff about ITAR. While the space politics blog gets out its crystal ball and peers into the future beyond the 2008 US presidential election.
On a slightly scarier note space.com is reporting that NASA is checking Shuttle solid rocket booster o-rings after a recent batch turned out to be less than acceptable. Space.com also reported the news that broke at the end of last week about Northrop Grumman buying 100% of the equity of Scaled Composites, developer of SpaceShipOne and its successor SpaceShipTwo. Alex Tai, Virgin Galactic chief operating officer, declared this good news at the Space Frontier Foundation's New Space 2007 event in Washington DC last week.
To read about the New Space 2007 event go here and scroll down for day by day coverage in a very concise format.
While Virgin Galactic works towards its in-service date the Japanese are having problems with their lunar probe.
But Brazil is having more success with its space programme, go here for details on its latest sounding rocket launch.
The Russians however are signing more deals to carry space tourists, oops, I mean spaceflight participants, in the near future.
For those of you who can't quite afford the $20 million plus to get to the real thing NASA has created a virtual version.
But its not clear if you can engage in the space station crew's up coming activity, dumping unwanted equipment "overboard" so it can burn up on re-entry.
Over at Personal Spaceflight you can learn more about the latest slightly less wealthy individuals who can afford the $200,000 for a suborbital flight but not the $20 million.
Hobbyspace.com has some interesting info on NASA working on inflatable habitats, inspired by Bigelow Aerospace's success perhaps?
As western and Asian civilians line up to become "astronauts" the Chinese are selecting a new bunch of heroes for the nation.
And here Yang Liwei talked obtusely about space walk training, but you could have read about that here on Flightglobal.com months ago.
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