This gray powder from inside a Martian “mudstone” contains sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and carbon—all chemical ingredients for life as we know it on Earth and a major target of the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. In a first for planetary science, the mission's nuclear-powered Curiosity rover drilled the hole at left, after a test run to the right, and transferred some of the powder to its internal chemistry labs.

Unwieldy U.S. military procurement continues to hamper the use of hosted payloads as a time- and cost-saving way to put sensors and relays into orbit, even with a hosted UHF link serving troops and sailors in Afghanistan and the rest of the Indian Ocean region. That hosted payload on the Intelsat 22 bird belongs to the Australian Defense Force (ADF) and has worked well since its launch a year ago on a Proton. The ADF paid $167 million for the 18 UHF channels and had them up and running less than three years after it signed the contract.

Partnerships aim to blunt new challenges from U.S., China

The deficit-reduction measure that went into effect March 1 cuts 7.9% from discretionary defense spending and 5.3% from non-defense discretionary spending. Surely, Washington's latest manufactured crisis will not do any serious damage, will it? Well, consider this:

With a U.K. commitment to increase its European Space Agency contribution 25%, the space industry is becoming a major economic driver in Britain. The nation's £1.2 billion ($1.8 billion) pledge to ESA programs is part of a larger €10-billion ($13 billion) spending package the agency approved last November, making the U.K. the agency's third-largest funder—after France and Germany—and positioning Astrium U.K. to reap the benefits.

It's been 10 years since the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) began its careful probe into the reasons NASA lost a second space shuttle. The late Sally Ride, a member of both the CAIB and the Rogers Commission set up after the first shuttle disaster, famously commented at the time that she heard an “echo of Challenger” in the loss of Columbia. Now many of the conditions that allowed the U.S.