NASA is taking on the tried and tested formula of the Apollo program that brought the first humans to the Moon way back in 1969, as they are faced with tight deadlines and uncertain budgets. The team has been ripping apart the Apollo to examine its ancient parts as a reference for the new rocket.

The new manned exploration project, called Constellation, is deliberately drawing upon lessons from the past as the space agency works to meet a congressional deadline of flying the Ares rocket by 2014. In fact, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has described the new program as "Apollo on steroids."

"We're not inventing rocket engines. This is an evolution," NASA associate administrator Scott Horowitz said during a visit to Marshall, which is in charge of developing propulsion systems for the new spacecraft. "You get the benefits of the heritage, but you also get the benefits of new technology to help drive down costs."

But will history repeat itself?

In the forefront of space exploration, Russia is reportedly set to launch two new orbital laboratories. The unmanned spacecrafts will be docked at the International Space Station when not venturing into the great unknown for three to four months at a time carrying out experiments that involve zero gravity, materials in space and biotechnologies. Upon returning to the ISS, the samples they have gathered will be sent back to Earth through small-sized landing capsules for further testing.

Russian space officials claim that this will not only create a potentially profitable research system but, in the course, eliminate the need for increasingly expensive multiple rocket launches. However, no exact date for the launch has been mentioned yet.

Scientists have discovered an enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million-light years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas; they now think is the largest known object in the universe. How big is it really?

Let's just say that the galaxies that they have found in the composition of the blob is packed four times closer than the universe's average. And the gas bubbles found inside it are 400,000 light years across. That is twice the diameter of the Andromeda Galaxy. One of the existing theories about these bubbles is that they will one day give birth to new galaxies.

"Something this large and this dense would have been rare in the early universe," said study team member Ryosuke Yamauchi from Tohoku University. It is aligned along three curvy filaments that is believed to have came into existence after the theoretical Big Bang.

"The structure we discovered and others like are probably the precursors of the largest structures we see today which contain multiple clusters of galaxies," Yamauchi said.

The crew of STS-121 has finally landed on the International Space Station. ISS Expedition 13 commander Pavel Vinogradov and flight engineer Jeffrey Williams, acted as the welcoming committee for the crew. The two are terribly excited at having new faces on board.

“Obviously, that will be a good time,” Williams said earlier of the prospect of having nine people living aboard the ISS.

The two have spent most of their time making the ISS a suitable abode by throwing out trash and unneeded material that will make the return trip to Earth. This also cleared up some space to accommodate more people inside the station.

Upon the team's arrival, first order of the day is to make a complete photographic survey of the shuttle’s tile-lined belly. Vinogradov and Williams will take pictures of Discovery's heat-resistant tiles using high-resolution digital cameras, while Steven Lindsey guides the shuttle through a back flip known in NASA circles as the Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver.

Apart from the Discovery crew, the ISS will have another resident in the form of German astronaut and the first non-U.S. or Russian spaceflyer to take an extended flight to the orbital research laboratory, Thomas Reiter.

Reiter is expected to serve aboard the ISS through the remainder of the Expedition 13 mission and the first half of the Expedition 14 mission, which is currently set to launch on Sept. 16. He is also slated to return to Earth in December during Discovery’s STS-116 shuttle mission, NASA said.

Who wants glares in their photographs? Certainly not me and, apparently, not Webster Cash, director of University of Colorado at Boulder Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.

"We would use the starshade as a giant hand to suppress the light emanating from a central star by a factor of about 10 billion," says Cash. He likens the coronagraph to an outfielder holding up one hand to block the sun and get a better view of the ball he is about to catch.

This device is not an entirely new concept. It has and is being used by Sun-watchers for a while now. They block out the main light from the sun giving them a good view of its surrounding. But conventional coronagraphs tend to have light spread out causing a bleeding around the edges. However, the proposed model eliminates this problem by diffracting the light away from the area close to the star, thus, giving us a crystal clear view.

Because the technology needed to make this project into a reality is available, an excited Cash said, "We will be able to study Earth-like planets tens of trillions of miles away and chemically analyze their atmospheres for signs of life."

After two consecutive failures to launch because of bad weather conditions, on July 1 and 2, NASA's STS-121 mission is said to be "go" for the third time this July 4, 2006. "We're go to continue with the launch countdown," William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator of space operations, "I don't think we're taking any additional risks than we did in our original [flight] assessment."

Foam has been a long issue for the Discovery. This time there is too much foam loss, approximately less than one-tenth of an ounce. It fell from the uppermost bracket connecting a 17-inch liquid oxygen feedline to Discovery's orange external tank.

Although officials say that it is less than 50 per cent of the acceptable launch debris standards, there could be an ice build up of up to 0.0024 pounds and could fill the divot left by the liberated foam piece. Ice is also a potential launch debris risk.

NASA has been working on how to go around the foam issue for three years now. If you remember, this kind of matter caused the Columbia to sustain sizable damage during it's launch in January, 2003.

Discovery is now back on track to launch NASA's STS-121 mission on July 4. Liftoff is currently set for 2:37:55 p.m. EDT (1837:55 GMT), with current weather forecast predicting a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions for flight.

One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Dr. Stephen William Hawking, is urging all of us to pack up and leave our beloved planet and move into artificial habitats in space or in a deconstructed Moon. In his recent talk in Hong Kong, the famous physicist said, "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers."

He mentions the wrong shape of the earth as one of the leading factors on why we must flee. Mathematics will support this idea of Hawking's to an outstanding degree. Think about it. The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has less surface area than any other form of the same volume. This means that, in the near future we could have already occupied most of the existing land on the planet.

But, he also poses possible solutions to our dilemma. We could either occupy Mars now, and by the mid-century we'd already have it filled. And even that won't be the best solution, because we are still moving into a sphere, which the main reason why we are moving out. So, he then suggests along with physicists like Freeman Dyson, that asteroids and perhaps the diminutive worlds of the Kuiper Belt, could be the next best thing. Unfortunately, Dyson reckons that our descendants will migrate to where land is abundant.

Building artificial habitats in space could probably be the perfect solution to our realty needs. This is not an entirely new concept though. Building gigantic, rotation aluminum cylinders in orbit, has dated back to 1970s, when Gerald O'Neill and Tom Heppenheimer wrote speculative books on how it might be done. Or if that doesn't sound appealing to you, we can always take the moon apart and redevelop it as a dream suburbia.

The Starfire Optical Range on the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico is a research laboratory, whose primary duty is to develop and demonstrate optical wavefront control technologies. But according to Colonel Gregory Vansuch, chief of the installation, it could transform to a docile picture taking device of heavenly bodies to a military super weapon.

“We don’t hide the fact that it could help build an anti-satellite weapon. If you choose to do it,” says Vansuch.

On a normal day, what the SOR does is shoot a laser 56 miles into the mesosphere with scientists measuring the distortion it has created and then adjust the laser's mirrors until the beam is back in focus. It's been reported that the SOR can take photos that are 40 times sharper than uncorrected pictures.

But in an article published in the New York Times, it says that research is being conducted at the laboratory into how to use ground-based lasers to disable satellites. No need to panic though. The politics surrounding space weapons are very tricky and may take a while before this becomes some sort of death ray to wipe out all mankind. Whew.

NASA has been very busy putting all their efforts in creating a 21st century exploration system that will be affordable, reliable, versatile, and safe with the ability to carry four astronauts at a time to and from the moon. It will be reminiscent of an Apollo capsule, only three times larger. The new ship can be used 10 times.

Unlike before, we're going to be staying a little longer in the moon this time. Once a lunar outpost is established, crews could remain on the lunar surface for up to six months.

The space agency has released some high resolution photographs to give us a better idea on how they are going to the moon and back.

We have long been caught in the mystery of parallel universes and other dimensions. Just look at the slew of movies running on this theme (i.e The One, Sliding Doors, Space Odyssey, etc.) Even with the most powerful and sensitive instruments, scientists have only uncovered a meager 4% of the Universe. The other 96% is unchartered territory made up of dark matter and equally dark energy.

But new theories beg to disagree with this previously believed notions. What other scientists are saying that it may not be unknown after all. That it could just be familiar gravity acting strangely over large distances. As shown by Pioneer 10 and 11 in the 1980s when astronomers noticed that some unseen force was slowing the down.

Physicists Varun Sahnia and Yuri Shtanov, to shed some light to this situation, proposed APSIS - an Artificial Planetary System in Space. This spacecraft will launch a miniature solar system in L2 Lagrange Point, where the forces of gravity from the Earth and the Sun cancels out, to probe extra-dimensional gravity and MOND.

This artificial solar system would be enclosed within the larger spacecraft that would protect it from cosmic rays, dust, solar wind, and anything else that could interact with the orbiting “planets”. Even the spacecraft’s fuel tank, which will decrease in mass over time would need to be positioned as far away from the mini-planets as possible so they don’t experience changing gravity over time.

Other applications of this proposed project is for cosmologists to test other theories of gravity, extra dimensions, dark energy and dark matter.