even though you make your nest amoung the stars

Prophecies concerning The space race

Are we in the end times? Check out these articles verses and read the following news articles and decide for yourself. Russian Group Plans Men on Mars, Panelists Advise Moon-to-Mars U.S. Awards First Suborbital Aircraft License

verses

Habakkuk 2
8 Because you have plundered many nations, the peoples who are left will plunder you. For you have shed man's blood; you have destroyed lands and cities and everyone in them. 9 "Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain to set his nest on high, to escape the clutches of ruin! 10 You have plotted the ruin of many peoples, shaming your own house and forfeiting your life.

Jeremiah 49
15 "Now I will make you small among the nations, despised among men. 16 The terror you inspire and the pride of your heart have deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks, who occupy the heights of the hill. Though you build your nest as high as the eagle's, from there I will bring you down," declares the LORD .

Obadiah 1
3 The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks [1] and make your home on the heights, you who say to yourself, 'Who can bring me down to the ground?' 4 Though you soar like the eagle and make your nest among the stars, from there I will bring you down," declares the LORD. 5 "If thieves came to you, if robbers in the night- Oh, what a disaster awaits you- would they not steal only as much as they wanted? If grape pickers came to you, would they not leave a few grapes?

Something to think about.

Russian Group Plans Men on Mars Russian Group Plans Men on Mars by 2011 By MARIA DANILOVA MOSCOW (AP) - A group of Russian space experts on Friday announced an ambitious plan to send a six-man crew to Mars within a decade, a project it said would cost only $3.5 billion. Russian space officials dismissed the project as nonsense. A researcher at the Central Research Institute for Machine-Building, Russia's premier authority on space equipment design, said it would carry out the project with funding promised by Aerospace Systems, a little-known private Russian company that says it draws no resources from the state budget. The program envisions six people traveling to Mars and exploring it for several months before returning to Earth. The expedition is designed to last three years in all, and would depend on a fully equipped spacecraft containing its own garden, medical facilities and other amenities. Georgy Uspensky, a department head at the institute, said that the comparatively small budget for the program reflected plans to use already existing spacecraft. ``This will be our first flight ... we will fly on what we have,'' Uspensky said. By contrast, President Bush's call for restoring manned flights to the Moon is estimated at costing $12 billion over the next five years. Oleg Alexandrov, director of Aerospace Systems, said that the flight was scheduled for 2009, but Uspensky predicted it would happen around 2011-13. Earlier this year, Bush proposed a manned mission to visit the planet but did not set a timeline for such a trip, which American scientists believe would probably remain decades away. Sergei Gorbunov, spokesman for the Russian Space Agency, said he had never heard of the project and that it ``was absolutely impossible'' to implement with such a meager budget and in such a short time period. ``Both U.S. and Russian experts have estimated that the Mars project costs around a trillion dollars. How can they launch this with so little money?'' Gorbunov said. Alexandrov didn't explain how his firm would raise the funds, but said one of the reasons he thought such a mission would be profitable was it could involve a ``reality'' television show. The Soviet Union put the first man and the first satellite in space and, in 1988, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was the first to propose a joint U.S.-Russian manned mission to Mars. But Washington's reaction was lukewarm, and the Soviet Union collapsed just three years later, leaving Russia's space program in shambles. Its space industries have struggled ever since. The single interplanetary robotic mission that Russia managed to mount since the Soviet collapse failed miserably in 1996. Despite the money crunch, designers have continued drafting projects of new spaceships. ``There are two goals here: to be the first ones and to show the rest of the wold that this is possible. We'll be the first ones to do this and this will boost Russia's national prestige,'' said Viktor Ivanov, another researcher from the institute. 04/09/04 14:36

Panelists Advise Moon-to-Mars Commission on How to Get to 'Beyond' Deciding not only how to explore space, but where to go in the first place, are critical issues for NASA's long-term space exploration missions, according to scientists and aerospace experts addressing a presidential commission Friday. NASA's space vision to send astronauts back to the moon, then Mars, does implicitly address two of its three goals for human exploration, but that doesn't mean it's too early to start looking at the "beyond" bit, panelists told the team charged with shaping U.S. space exploration policy. "The 'beyond' doesn't really require astronauts," said Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. "But it does require telescope systems." Lunine told commissioners that NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission, a space-based telescope to seek out Earth-like planets orbiting alien stars, is a good example of what the space agency is currently doing to identify new targets for space exploration. Lunine appeared Friday before the Presidential Commission on the Implementation on United States Space Exploration Policy, on the second and last day of the commission's hearings in San Francisco. President George W. Bush appointed the commission to recommend the best course to fulfill his space vision of returning humans to the moon, and sending them onward to Mars, in the next 40 years. "TPF is the gateway to something much grander," Lunine said, adding the space telescope mission could determine whether alien planets have their own continents and oceans. A follow-up, larger version of TPF could even determine whether a world would be habitable for life, though Lunine admitted such a tool would take two decades or more to develop. Other astronomers said robotic missions to nearby asteroids, as well as Mars and the moon, could expand NASA's targets for eventual human visitors, possibly culminating in long-term crewed missions aboard nuclear-powered spacecraft. Space pitstops Human missions to local asteroids could serve as an incremental step for astronauts making the leap from the moon to Mars. James Benson, founder and CEO of the private space firm SpaceDev in Poway, California, told commissioners that astronauts could make use of a minor asteroid belt sitting between Earth and Mars thought to contain dormant comets. The water in those comets, he said, could be converted in to rocket fuel for future missions, and is just one way NASA or even private companies could make use of resources waiting to be used in space. Some of those who spoke before the commission recommended the eventual use of Prometheus, a NASA project to build a spacecraft that relies on a nuclear reactor for power and propulsion, to visit a near-Earth asteroid and give the space rock a little push. The Prometheus project is currently being designed to serve the planned Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) mission. "Asteroids are important for three reasons," said David Morrison, senior scientist at NASA's Astrobiology Institute at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "They're left over building blocks of the planets, they could provide important materials such as iron and water in space and they do sometimes collide with the Earth." Sending the nuclear-powered Prometheus to an asteroid could be used not only prove Earth's capability to push space rocks off a collision course, but also the vehicle's space worthiness as well. "The near-Earth asteroid mission is far less challenging than JIMO," Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart told commissioners. Getting there Another challenge to NASA's space vision is developing new propulsion methods that will carry astronauts through space. "It's pretty clear that propulsion is the enabling technology to achieve this mission," said Edward "Pete" Aldridge, chairman of the presidential commission. Aerospace experts told commissioners that NASA does have the rocket technologies to achieve many of its near-term goals, such as sending robotic probes to the moon and Mars. But mid-range goals out past 2012 will require human-rated expendable launch systems that have yet to be developed. The launch system we put in place must serve this nation for many years after the shuttle's retirement," said Byron Wood, of Boeing Rocketdyne, adding that new or modified rocket engines will be required for future space vehicles. "Without at least some investment from the government, this space vision will not be achievable, or in the least, it will be severely handicapped."

Mars mission to inspire humanity Writer Ray Bradbury, left, addresses members of the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond, via satellite in San Francisco. SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Human exploration of the moon and Mars will move humanity beyond terrorism and war, inspiring the public in much the same way as Europeans who explored North America 500 years ago, science-fiction author Ray Bradbury said Thursday. Bradbury praised President Bush's initiative to return humans to the moon by 2020 and later land astronauts on the Red Planet. He spoke before a presidential commission reviewing the president's proposal. The panel is to make recommendations to NASA and the president in June. "If you sell it on the basis of a new freedom, a new movement away from the politics and horror and terror on Earth, I think people will recognize how (important) that is," Bradbury said. Bradbury, 83, faced skeptical questions from some commission members. Commissioner Paul Spudis, a visiting scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, asked how space exploration could be sold to the "practical side" of the American public. Another panel member noted that many people complain about spending money on space exploration when there are many more pressing problems on Earth. Bradbury said $1 billion a day is spent on war and conflicts. President Bush's proposal, announced in January, would be funded by $1 billion in new NASA funding each of the next five years. "If we take one day each year and spend it on space travel, we could do it," Bradbury said via a satellite link from Los Angeles. Bradbury said such challenges did not stop Spain and England from supporting explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. "All sorts of problems hadn't been solved," Bradbury said. "If they had stayed there, there wouldn't have been an America." The panel also wondered whether public support would dwindle if astronauts were killed on interplanetary missions. Bradbury, who wrote about the human colonization of Mars in "The Martian Chronicles," said thousands of people died exploring North America. "You simply do not give up," he said.

U.S. Awards First Suborbital Aircraft License WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the first time the government has cleared a commercial aviator to fly to the edge of Earth's orbit in an experimental aircraft that could become the model for taking tourists into space, regulators said on Wednesday. The Federal Aviation Administration issued the license for a commercially sponsored suborbital manned flight to Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites group of Mojave, California. Scaled Composites is competing in a privately run, $10 million contest to send a reusable craft carrying three people on a suborbital round-trip. The flight would have to be repeated within two weeks to win the X Prize. The government license, issued on April 1, is good for one year. Enterprising companies have taken reservations for space tourism for years, but regulatory hurdles and the lack of affordable technology have blocked commercial travel. Rutan flies SpaceShipOne, a rocket-powered winged craft designed to be launched at 50,000 feet from a plane. It has completed nearly a dozen preliminary test flights and broke the sound barrier last year. Rutan's craft will land like a plane. Twenty-seven contestants representing seven countries have already registered for the X Prize contest, modeled on the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh claimed by flying solo from New York to Paris in 1927. The U.S. government, through NASA, has been sending astronauts into space for four decades.