The silver lapel badge is being given to all UK-born spacefarers who get to orbit the Earth.
This week we saw new horizons dawn for green transportation as NASA's Nanosail-D became the first solar sail spacecraft to orbit the earth and President Obama issued a call for one million electric vehicles in his State of the Union Address.
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And after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, the United States went about winning the Space Race by investing in science and technology, leading not only to small steps on the moon but also to tremendous economic benefits here on Earth.
Its most striking feature is to delegate the humdrum task of ferrying people and equipment to low-Earth orbit to the private sector.
That is exactly what the President had in mind when he laid out a fresh course for NASA to explore new scientific frontiers and take Americans ever deeper into our Solar System while relying on private-sector innovators working in the competitive free market to ferry astronauts and cargo to Low Earth Orbit and the International Space Station.
Look no further than Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth, soon becoming the first animal to die in orbit, not too long after achieving that earlier distinction.
"We need to get NASA out of the business of getting crew" to low-earth orbit, she told The Wall Street Journal at the time.
The rocket's ascent took the lab out over the Pacific, and on a path to an orbit some 350km above the Earth.
And a long duration living and working in space is what the Space Station is all about -- to do the research and the science necessary to take us beyond Earth orbit.
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As it lost weight, it started to incline its orbit toward the earth: it was dangerous, above and beyond anything else.
While we applaud the work that has been accomplished by the private spaceflight industry, such programs are focused exclusively on developing systems for access to low Earth orbit following the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle.
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Newton was able to go from the behaviour of bodies falling to Earth to the mechanism that holds planets in orbit.
The risks and burdens of developing transport to low Earth orbit will thus fall to the private sector.
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NASA's slice of the pie includes a plan that would improve detection of near-Earth asteroids, send a solar-powered robot ship (like the NASA concept above) to capture one of the space rocks and tow it back to a stable orbit near Earth, where researchers could study it up close.
Russia says it also remains committed to sending cosmonauts beyond Earth's orbit in the future, including to a permanent base on the moon that it says could be used as a future launching pad for flights to Mars.
Since Kepler 62 is a cooler star than our sun, planets can orbit closer to it than the Earth can to our sun before overheating.
The commercial efforts to low Earth orbit, which SpaceX achieved, are only a piece of the U.S. space program.
The asteroid orbits the Sun in 368 days - a period similar to Earth's year - but it does not orbit in the same plane as the Earth.
Dragon went on to become the first commercial spacecraft to reach orbit and safely return to earth.
The rocket was intended to lift the satellite into an orbit 35, 696 kilometers above the earth, but during its final burn, the upper stage engine shut down four minutes early, and the satellite was released into too low of an orbit.
The perigee of its elliptical orbit (the closest point it comes to Earth) has actually risen slightly, and is just above 200km.
The other way of doing things is for the company to retrieve smaller asteroids, put them into orbit around Earth or the moon, and then dissect them at its leisure.
Yeomans and colleagues are using telescopes on the ground and in space to nail down the precise orbit of objects that might threaten Earth and predict whether the planet could be hit.
In theory, by delegating to the private sector the humdrum business of ferrying food and astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit, NASA hopes to free up cash to do other, more difficult things, including sending people to nearby asteroids by 2025, and on to Mars by the 2030s.
American astronaut Alan Shepard made a suborbital flight later that year, and John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.
Others, including Pirate Party co-chairman Gregory Engels, seem to prefer the idea of a low-Earth-orbit satellite that would be harder to launch but easier to keep airborne than a slowly-deflating balloon.
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"This will be one step in the long road to human expansion off of the planet into low-Earth orbit and beyond, " NASA astronaut Donald Pettit, one of Burbank's crewmates aboard the station, said Friday.
Late Friday, NASA put out a statement indicating that the satellite's orbit was taking it as close as 90 miles to the Earth and re-entry was expected around midnight or early Saturday Eastern Daylight Time.
The intention was to give the US a crew-carrier and rocket technology that could go beyond low-Earth orbit to more distant targets, back to the Moon and further.
Within five to 10 years, however, the company expects to progress from selling observation platforms in orbit around Earth to prospecting services.
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