And just when we thought the Red Menace was gone, here comes China plotting to overtake the Space Continuum.

China is planning to send a three man crew of "space communists" into space next year and they want to spend their time "learning the Party’s policies and exchanging opinions on the Party’s decisions."

MIT researchers have come up with a way to ‘capture’ an asteroid so that astronauts can see it up close and personal.

Basically, they want to really lasso this sucker with a rope (I do not make these things up). No cowboy involved though. The rope would be launched from a "remote-controlled rocket."

This may a bit too ambitious, but a company is actually shooting for a 2012 opening of the Galactic Suite, a hotel in space. For a mere $4 million for a three-day stay, you can start saving those benjamins now. Read It

MIT’s Dava Newman has designed a space suit. The suit is called the Biosuit. This space was designed for Paris’ adventure into space. It’s like so hot… The suit is designed for optimum maneuvering and is fully functional…

In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.

Traditional bulky spacesuits "do not afford the mobility and locomotion capability that astronauts need for partial gravity exploration missions. We really must design for greater mobility and enhanced human and robotic capability," Newman says.

"Newman, her colleague Jeff Hoffman, her students and a local design firm, Trotti and Associates, have been working on the project for about seven years. Their prototypes are not yet ready for space travel, but demonstrate what they’re trying to achieve–a lightweight, skintight suit that will allow astronauts to become truly mobile lunar and Mars explorers. Newman anticipates that the BioSuit could be ready by the time humans are ready to launch an expedition to Mars, possibly in about 10 years. Current spacesuits could not handle the challenges of such an exploratory mission, Newman says."

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biosuit-0716.html

The suit is still in design and it is suppose to be ready for the Mars missions. Paris still wants one for the next Academy Awards.

A test for a new rocket for SpaceShipTwo, intended for Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic private space company, went tragically wrong when an explosion killed two people and injured four others. No word yet on why the explosion occurred at a remote pad at the Mojave Air and Space Port. Burt Rutan, owner and founder of the rocket’s manufacturer, Scaled Composite, was not at the site when the explosion occurred.