Does this have to do with the failure of the latest Russian resupply mission? And what about the contract for SpaceX in a couple months?

Yes that is exactly what the article is talking about, since the Russians have to figure out the cause of the failure it may be a while before they can send up another manned mission meaning that the current astronauts manning the ISS may have to return home before the Russians are ready to send more up there.

And the shuttles can only stay up for 200 days. I didn't realize that the ships degraded being up there, an interesting issue.

We'd have a brand-spanking-new space vehicle all ready to go if certain "fiscally-minded" individuals hadn't gotten it canceled...

By which I'm sure you mean, if Obama didn't think it was more important for NASA to do outreach to the Muslim community than to go to the moon.

Obama is under constant pressure to reduce spending in the name of "fiscal discipline". I think it was a mistake for him to make that decision, and I think less of him for it, but he only made it based on the political climate he was trapped in.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/30/7531864-stellar-blasts-caught-on-video

The link url pretty much explains what this is. Some pretty cool stuff popping out from some young stars

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44365889/ns/technology_and_science-space/?gt1=43001

Seems they are finding more and more signs of a wetter Mars long ago. The rover named Opportunity has finally made it to a large crater.

On another note, these rovers (There was another, but it went quiet in 2010) were sent to Mars and landed January 2004, and were there for a 3 month mission. From what I've read, they didn't expect the rovers to last this long. Hopefully Opportunity will last a good little while to help find some other interesting things up there

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/07/7651951-7-ton-nasa-satellite-set-to-fall

Seems the UARS is being set to burn up (some of it anyways) in the atmosphere. This satellite was sent up to study our atmosphere, and was decommissioned back in 05. It seems it is just now ready to return to Earth.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44442011/ns/technology_and_science-space/?GT1=43001

They've found a planet roughly 650 Light years away from our planet, in the constellation Lyra. The way they noticed it was the fact that a planet that was being monitored had a +/- 5 minute difference in each rotation monitored around its sun. This has led them to conclude that a planetary body with enough gravitational force is causing the monitored planet to slow down or speed up, depending on where they are in relation to each other when being monitored.

<3 planet searches.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44453018/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/old-faithful-keeps-spouting-huge-solar-flares/

Seems our sun has been doing some intense CMEs lately. Also if you happen to notice, the sun is burning white, aka hotter, than it used to. Seen multiple theories out there, though the most credible one I've seen is that there is another body out there, possibly a brown dwarf, that orbits our sun every X amount of years, and causes gravitational stress on the sun, which makes it burn hotter.

But, who knows really. We still know very little about the sun as it is.

Related to this post. ELEnin is expected to pass September 26th, 2011.

I sent a link to Kerm when I saw this on Facebook a few weeks back at work. I watched the video when I got home but never made a post because I thought it was hype and/or fake.

Maybe it's not.

Well, not wanting to bring conspiracies and the like into this thread, however. There are numerous ancient texts that discuss things that we didn't know existed until 30 or so years ago. And these texts are thousands of years old.

While not a conspiracy nut, nor do I adhere to such things, there is a measure of truth in any conspiracy, theory or myth. May not be overly big, but there has to be some level of truth to it.

With what the planet is doing (all the volcanoes going off, the plates are shifting and the magnetic poles shifting drastically would also indicate that a magnetic body could possibly be messing with us as well, if it is the case) it really makes me wonder how much validity the supposed 'conspiracy' theories out there surrounding these spacial bits actually have.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/nasa-shoots-down-comet-elenin-doom-and-gloom-

You know, they say that, but most of the major earthquakes we've had over the last few years, we had an alignment with this comet, or quite possibly, whatever is trailing after the comet, if one were to go into that theory. Who really knows :<

Inverse square laws my friend.

The problem I see is we have no real accurate way of measuring gravitational effects any object in space my cause.

And if the comet has an iron core under all that ice and it's causing issues with the sun's magnetic fields, who knows what that might do to us? Just speculation, of course.

We do, by measuring perturbations in expected orbits. If we can do that to find planets in distant solar systems, we can do it here in our own.

If my dad can find a video he found, I will share it with you. He said it went into great detail on how the solar system's magnetic fields work, and if you drop in objects in different places, it causes some pretty wicked shifts.

Also: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44466008/ns/technology_and_science-space/?gt1=43001

Sending up to probes to learn more about the MOON.