CAPE CANAVERAL — A Russian cosmonaut would whack a golf ball from the International Space Station in an advertising stunt on Thanksgiving Day, NASA officials said Tuesday.

Russian flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin would show off his swing to help a Canadian golf club manufacturer during a spacewalk on Nov. 23.

NASA security officers have cleared the stunt, saying it poses no threat to the space station or the team since the golf ball weighs only 3 grams and would return to Earth’s atmosphere in three days.

“It’s not like Tiger Woods taking a drive,” said Kirk Shireman, deputy program manager of the international space station.

MOSCOW – The International Space Station would be dismantled after 2015 to be replaced with a fresh orbital station, a Russian Space Agency official said Tuesday.

“It is necessary because at present we can monitor less than 10% of Russian territory, but with a new station the coverage will be increased tenfold,” said Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of the agency.

He said the new space station will be used to make materials that are not possible to manufacture on Earth and to improve the methods of remote monitoring of the Earth.

Davydov also said Russia will test technologies for space journey to the Moon and Mars in 2015-2025.

“And after 2025 we are planning to start the preparation for interplanetary missions,” he said, adding that international projects of such proportions should be implemented on the base of alike participation and global partnership.

More than a decade ago, the international space station was sold as the leading platform for space science, with familiar applications back on Earth.

But the budget for space station research has been slash considerably over the past year, and is due to is slashed even more intensely next year. Starting with Sunday’s listed launch of the space shuttle Atlantis, NASA is turning its attention to flying up hardware rather than doing science.

Some observers say that NASA now sees the orbital outpost as a $100 billion white elephant to be finished, and then rapidly left behind in America’s new push to the moon, Mars and beyond.

Khimki, Aug 20: In an anonymous complex next to a suburban Moscow Shopping Centre, a retired Russian Army General is setting up his next galactic conquest.

Georgy Polishchuk, head of the Lavochkin Association, is preparing an unmanned mission to a moon of Mars that would search for signs of life on the red planet and try to unlock the universe’s secrets.

“We have to find life and whether it can be sustained,” Polishchuk said, his eyes shiny as his pen drew out the planned way during a dialogue this month at the installation.

The theory that there might be life on mars, bolstered by signs that there has been or still is water on the planet, has enthralled scientists and space enthusiasts about the world for more than a century.

Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams is now undergoing rigorous training as a team member of space shuttle Discovery to be launched by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), this December. Discovery would dock with the International Space Station orbiting the Earth. Williams would transfer to the station, where she would spend about six months.

NASA provided elite access to SAW to film inside the mock-up facility at its Houston headquarters, where the crew is at present training for the upcoming mission. This is the first time for this mission that an Indian TV team has been allowed to film inside this facility.

NASA will try to launch space shuttle Atlantis on August 27 to restart edifice of the half-built International Space Station, US space agency officials said on Wednesday.

Launch was set for 4:30pm EDT (08:30 NZT August 28), but technical issues should be resolved before the shuttle is officially cleared for flight.

“The challenge of the space station assembly is actually huge. It might not go exactly the way it’s all scripted,” NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama (Reuters) – The Air Force’s new top leader for space predicted on Tuesday future attacks on U.S. satellites and called for really expanded tracking and identification of payloads launched by other countries.

Currently, U.S. efforts are focused on formative if an overseas launch is a ballistic missile or designed to put a thing in orbit, then cataloging it over a period that could take weeks, said Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton, who heads the Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado.

“I say those days are over,” he told an annual conference here on the fledgling, multibillion-dollar U.S. anti-missile shield. “If it’s a space launch, we can’t afford to relax.”

Over 70 applicants have submitted requests to the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Biomedical Problems Institute since the end of July by volunteers willing to join the Mars- 500 experiment, Institute spokesman Mark Belakovsky told Inter-fax.

“The more than 70 volunteers, among them six women and a married couple, come from 17 countries,” Belakovsky said.

He said applications had been acknowledged from citizens of Australia, Argentina, Belarus, Bulgaria, Brazil, Belgium, Britain, India, Italy, Spain, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, the United States, Ukraine and Estonia.

STENNIS, MS, United States (UPI) — Officials at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi announced two agreement awards Wednesday.

Mississippi Space Services, situated at Stennis, received a one-year contract addition to provide ability operating services at the center. Stennis also exercised the first option on a six-year, cost-plus-award-fee agreement with Sverdrup Technology Inc., to support propulsion test operations at the center and at NASA`s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The one-year contract extension for Mississippi Space Services is valued at $61.6 million, and the agreement option for Sverdrup has an predictable value of $42.4 million.

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) — NASA says it is about to board on a series of space flights as hard as any in history in order to complete the International Space Station.

‘The flights ahead will be the most complex and challenging we’ve ever carried out for construction of the International Space Station in orbit,’ said Mike Suffredini, NASA station program manager. ‘The station literally becomes a new spacecraft with each assembly mission, and that would be true starting this year with vivid changes in its cooling and power systems, habitable volume, operation capability as well as its appearance.’