Space Future’s own Carol Pinchefsky has won the 2012 NewSpace Journalism Award, given by the Space Frontier Foundation (SFF). She will be accepting the award in person at their gala in Santa Clara, California, on July 28, 2012.

China, a country with over 4500 years of recorded history, gave the world, gunpowder, paper, compasses, movable type, and even the seismological detector. Now China has one more bullet point to its list of achievements: It’s the third country to have docked two spacecraft in orbit.

Are you a high school teacher of science, technology, engineering, or math? Do you like space? Do you know that, with the advent of private space companies, NASA won’t be the only way to get there? If so, there’s a workshop just for you…and 139 others just like you.

Space is a dirty place. Over 16,000 pieces of debris over 10 cm wide have been left behind since Sputnik took to the skies in 1957. And now the Swiss want to do something about it. Scientists with the Swiss Space Center at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, are developing a “janitor” satellite, known as CleanSpace One, to make space tidier.

The Space Renaissance International (SRI) has held their inaugural congress live on Skype and included over 100 space development advocates from around the world.

In an essay in the Washington Post on May 25, 2011, Dr. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society wrote:

In 2009, Manhattan Beach, CA-based company Solaren, Inc. signed a contract with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to provide 200 megawatts (MW) of clean, reliable electrical power to customers at a rate comparable with existing power generation facilities.

Space and technology writer Michael Belfiore has reported on Sierra Nevada Corporation’s (SNC) DreamChaser seven-seat spacecraft. SNC was one of four companies awarded development money from NASA’s