Originally Posted by balthasar:
“Is there a confirmed replacement for the space shuttle .
The fellow I heard from got a little bit Dan Dare on the subject..”
Originally Posted by Assa2:
“No. There was the Constellation project which included Orion as the next manned spaceship for NASA but nthat has largely been cancelled and NASA are now looking to private ventures to come up with replacements. In the mean time the US & ESA will use Russia's Soyuz to get to and from the ISS.”
As Assa2 has pointed out, the USA will be dependent on Russia's Soyuz rocket
http://www.google.co.uk/images?um=1&...&aqi=&aql=&oq= for the immediate future once all the shuttles have been taken out of service.
In the medium term, the likely replacements for the shuttle originate from the private sector and what they are basically doing is reinventing the Saturn 1 rocket
http://www.google.co.uk/images?um=1&...&aqi=&aql=&oq= which will take astronauts into Earth orbit and to the ISS but they're not powerful enough to go to the Moon.
The two private sector contenders are Space X's Dragon capsule
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Dragon to be launched atop the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 rocket and Orbital Science's Prometheus lifting body
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HL20_mockup.jpeg to be launched atop an Atlas V rocket
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V. At the time of writing, Space X's proposals seem to be closer to practical realisation.
Space News Update
Earth is a gravity potato...
...and there's more here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12911806. The mass of the Earth is not uniformly spread and that means that parts of the planet contain more mass than other parts. That produces a variation in the Earth's gravitational field and that very variation has now been mapped by the GOCE satellite to produce a rather unusual gravity strength map.
The launch of the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA)...
...is covered in this article here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12924060. This new body will be responsible for devising and implementing British space policy and there's more at UKSA's website here
http://www.bis.gov.uk/ukspaceagency. This new agency will have a budget of some £220 million a year and space science recently received a boost in the last budget of £10 million
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12833654.
Whilst this is good news, UK funding for space is way behind other states such as France. The best that can be said is that UK space science is at least going in the right direction now.