It was February 1st, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. All seven crew members aboard STS-107 were tragically lost.
Now seven years later, NASA’s Space Shuttle program is almost over. There’s only five more shuttle flights planned before the space shuttle fleet is retired from service. U.S. astronauts will then have to hitch a ride with the Russian Space Agency, whose Soyuz and Progress spacecraft have been participating in the International Space Station program for years.
President Barack Obama is calling for drastic changes in the U.S. space program, taking the [...]

The past decade has been pretty exciting in the realm of space exploration. Here’s my look at NASA’s milestones in the past ten years.
NASA 2009 Year in Review
October 2009: water discovered on the moon by the LCROSS mission.
July 2009: 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing
May 2009: Hubble Space Telescope upgraded and repaired. Space walking astronauts from the Atlantis space shuttle gave the aging space telescope several new updated systems. Two new instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3 and Cosmic Origins Spectrograph were installed, while repairs were made to the Advanced Camera for Surveys and Space [...]

There’s an amazing story about survival from the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia.  Just a few months after Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry, searchers recovered pages from Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon’s diary.  They had survived a 37-mile fall to earth through extreme heat and cold, and were recovered from a field just outside Palestine, Texas.
That was in the spring of 2003.  Now five years later, part of the restored diary will be on display at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
The entire story is at http://hosted.ap.org