Added 1 new A* page:Just a few days after an unmanned, commercial Antares rocket, attempting to carry supplies to the International Space Station, self-destructed after launch, comes another, much worse blow to the fledgling commercial space industry: British spaceflight company Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo crashed in the Mojave Desert, killing one of the test pilots and wounding the other.
SpaceShipTwo was intended as a "space tourism" ship, designed to be released in midair by a jet-powered aircraft mothership, from which point SpaceShipTwo would use its rocket engine to boost into the upper atmosphere before gliding back to Earth; the company had hoped to start flying customers in 2015, and already has "more than 700 flight bookings at $250,000 (£156,000) each." But in this latest test flight, the aircraft broke up shortly after separating from its mothership, with the wreckage plunging to the desert below, catching fire, then exploding soon afterward; there's no word yet on how one of the pilots managed to survive, or how bad their injuries may be. No cause has been given as yet for the failure of the ship, but the BBC article notes that "the space craft was burning a new type of of rocket fuel never before used in flight, although officials said it had undergone extensive ground testing."
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You can head over to my tumblr to see the first ever photograph of a celestial object, a daguerreotype of the Moon taken by John William Draper in 1840; it's got a pretty wild look to it, I suppose due to how the plate was developed and has survived; it was created the year after Louis Daguerre went public with his invention of the photographic process. Draper is credited with a number of other scientific achievements as well, including one that is named after him: "In 1847 he published the observation that all solids glow red at about the same temperature, about 977 °F (798 K), which has come to be known as the Draper point."
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