NASA News

This week a demotion, a new name and did we really go to the moon?

D'oh! Sad news for our fellow plutonians, and I know there are lot of them out there reading this blog, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. To be even consider a planet, under the new definition, one has to be "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit" which de facto restrict the membership in our solar system to the eight "classical" planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Orion is the new name of the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (it's a bit more sexy than CEV) which will replace the aging space shuttle as the new manned spacecraft to get us back to the moon and beyond. The name was leaked to the press during a transmission between the International Space Station and Earth. Still I would have preferred a name like... Serenity...

Finally, 'cause I've been asked by a few people, no I didn't steal the original tapes (which are 4 time better quality than the pictures we know) of the moon landing for my own private collection. They're merely... lost/misplaced somewhere in the huge warehouses at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. And by the way for all those of you conspiracy theoricist, yes once and for all: we've been to the moon ;-)