At long last, NASA is going to return to the Moon. The £60 billion project will be the first mission to the Moon by NASA since 1972. Nasa is aiming to return astronauts to the moon by 2018 as part of a plan to launch manned missions to Mars. Two new rockets will be designed from shuttle boosters, engines and external tanks to launch astronaut crews and cargo separately from Kennedy Space Centre. An Apollo-style capsule, a propulsion module and a lunar lander will also be developed to ferry astronauts from Earth to the Moon and back. Nasa wants to establish a permanent base on the moon as a staging post for going to Mars.Nasa say they will return to the Moon no later than 2020 and the new rocket would combine elements of the space shuttle and earlier capsule designs. The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) designed to replace the shuttle fleet would be a capsule resembling a larger version of the Apollo capsule fixed to the top of a rocket, the astronauts would travel in this.The new spaceship will be three times the size of the capsules that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. Four astronauts would be able to go to the Moon at a go and up to six astronauts would be able to go to the International Space Station. Lockheed Martin and the Northrop Grumman-Boeing team are vying for the contract to build the capsule. Each one received $28 million contracts in July to develop preliminary proposals for the Crew Exploration Vehicle.

On Monday 30th August, Janet Smalley, aged 52 was just outside in her garden at 10-pm when she suddenly spotted something in the sky; She shouted to her family to come and look at something in the sky which was undulating. Her son, Daniel 25 brought his binoculars and when he looked at the object, he first thought it was a balloon. But on a second look noticed that it was undulating like a jellyfish. He couldn't get a clear view but the lights seemed to flicker like flames and were bright. The balloon had several points of little light in the centre of it, almost in a triangular arrangement. There were three of them, each was about a minute or two apart and appeared in sequence from left to right across the sky; The floated off towards Romford over the houses, getting higher and higher. It was like a firework and just disappeared into the stars. Her other son Alan 28 and husband Peter 53 were also amazed as they watched the lightshow.

Dozens of people from Jacksonville to Ft.Pierce flooded the U.S. Coast Guard last week reporting sightings of a mysterious ball of fire seen flying in the sky. People flooded the newsroom of Local 6 News partner Florida Today after they saw the object over the Space Coast on Tuesday night. Starting at 7.30 last night the online news editor Dave Larimer of Florida Today said In Fact, the Coast Guard station in Port Canaveral got more than two dozen reports of people seeing a bright light in the sky over the ocean. Up to now it has not been established what people have seen.

Peru has always been known for it's mystics and there has been reports of flying saucers, especially over the southern town of Chilca. According to locals, aliens have imbued mud springs there with special curative and fertility powers. During October 6th - 9th, in Lima a congress has been organised by the Alfa y Omega group, that believe a fleet of UFO's will fly to Earth at the end of the world and Christ could use one for his second coming. During the congress, the congress will pore over photos and grainy film of bright flashes and spooky shapes which believers say point to alien life forms.

Retired US Air Force Lt Col Donald Ware, 69 said his first contact with aliens was in 1953, he saw seven spacecraft flying over Washington, DC. During his service he saw no signs of extra-terrestrial life but he saw alien craft eight times since retiring in 1982.One minute Jonathan Reed was in the forest in Seattle hiking when his pet was being torn apart by a "Gray Alien." It had an elongated head and smelt of rotting fruit and the skin like that of a pig. It breathed, but did not speak but had red blood. Tests showed it had 46 chromosomes but nine were different. They resembled those of dolphins and sea turtles. Mr Reed who was a former child-developmental psychologist says he took the alien home and lived with it for 9 days. He communicated with it by telepathy and was able to get thoughts from his mind. Mr. Reed and Uruguayan Rafael Ulloa say aliens in spaceships spirit people away, and in New York's on the 11th September, 2001 they took people away from New York's twin towers.

Mr. Reed says he has a bracelet belonging to the extraterrestrial Wendell Stevens, a retired US Air Force colonel who worked from 1947 to 1949 in Alaska with B-29 planes fitted with special scientific instruments to detect the visitors, said he believes in aliens after having investigated 100 cases. He has a large archive of photographs of alleged UFOs in the world. He said that he did not believe in aliens before his work. He began working the year the US military was believed to have hushed up two purported crashes of alien spacecraft within a month, but the Air Force dismiss the stories. It was his job to debrief the crews of the B-29's and recounted how one time the radio frequency spectrum went completely haywire. The temperature in the airplane increased and when the crew looked out, there was a disc there. The crew took photographs with four difference types of camera but the military suppressed the photo's.

Our Sun has a twin. Nasa has discovered that our Sun has a twin. It is nearly identical in temperature, rotation and age. Scientists who were looking for extraterrestrial life are hoping to find planets orbiting around it. The star called 18 Scorpii, is less than 50 light years away in the constellation Scorpio. It burns slightly hotter than the sun and rotates slightly faster. It takes 23 days to complete a rotation rather than 25 so it is an extremely close match. Now they are hoping to find a planet orbiting around it that is about the same distance away as Earth.

Nasa has narrowed down the likely cause for the shedding of a large chunk of insulating form from the external fuel tank during the launch of the space shuttle Discovery in July 2005. It is believed that the workers may have accidentally nicked or nudged the foam when preparing the tank for launch. After the foam is applied is not normally touched. During the launch of Discovery, the insulation fell from the "protuberance air load" (PAL) which protects a cable tray from fast air flow during lift-off. The foam luckily did not strike the shuttle orbiter as it did with Columbia. The extra attention which was paid to the external tank after the Columbia accident saw more people working on and around the Discovery's tank. The top 3 metres of the PAL ramp was removed to access another part as the tank was being prepared for launch. It was a lower part of the PAL ramp that fell off during launch. That was not removed, but could have been cut by plastic knives or crushed by someone leaning on it while the upper part was removed and replaced. The investigation is not yet finished. Separate teams at NASA headquarter in Washington, DC and at Marshall Space Flight Centre are working independently to determine the probable cause of the foam shedding. It is also being considered that normal heating during the launch could be a possible cause. The next launch date is listed as March, 2006 but officials say that date is increasingly looking unlikely because of hurricane damage to NASA facilities and the foam fixes that lie ahead.

Nasa is developing plans for a lunar lander that could launch as early as 2 010. Part of its mission will be to demonstrate precision landing. The moon has no atmosphere so the lander cannot descend to the Moon in the same way Mars missions have touched down on the Red Planet using heat shields, parachutes and air bags. The critical part of the system is the rocket engine, the spacecraft also needs the ability to avoid boulders and craters. The lander is not technically a prototype for human missions, future versions of this lander could serve as cargo carriers for the lunar base. It is known as the Robotic Lunar Exploration Program-2 and will do some science, searching for water ice in areas of craters that are permanently shaded. Hints of such ice came from the Lunar Prospector orbiter, which spotted shaded areas rich in hydrogen. The lander will probably be equipped with engines that run on liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Nasa hope that in the future they can create rocket fuel from resources found on the moon. The landing site has not yet been determined, but it is likely that the rim of Shackleton Crater at the south pole will be it. This region is always in daylight , but parts of the crater remain in permanent shadow, making it an ideal candidate for a crewed missions in terms of water ice and power generation from solar energy. The lander will carry a craft that will explore the dark crater areas but the crater walls are fairly steep. It is really hard to drive into these craters so instead, the craft may fly or even hop around the Moon. Lift off in 2008 it is hoped Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will help scout out potential landing sites for its robotic successor. Nasa is drawing up plans for its moon launchers and the new rocket, known as the Crew Launch Vehicle will be built out of a modified version of the shuttle's solid rocket booster. The lander could be launched on existing Atlas 5 of Delta 4 rockets. Marshall and Goddard centres with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University will be in charge of developing the lander.

Michael Nixon 74, a former service man was returning from a long journey on Tuesday 13th September and was just approaching the A16 roundabout near Kenwith tip in Louth when he saw what he could only describe as a "Fireball." He described that directly in front of him on his windscreen there was an explosive flash of red light which appeared to be the size of a football but it filled his field of vision. It lasted a second. The intensity of it caused him to flinch and his eyes hurt. There was no noise, no sign of smoke and his car was unmarked. Funnily enough, 2 years ago he was the victim of another bizarre phenomenon when he was travelling along the same spot. He has a SAAB car which was very reliable, but its engine stopped completely.

Exactly two years after China's first manned space flight, two Chinese astronauts have successfully been launched into orbit.The two men chosen for the mission, former fighter pilots Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng, were selected after a rigorous screening process. The lift-off at 0900 local time (0100 GMT) was from Jiuquan in the Gobi desert and was shown on state television and included views from a camera on the outside of the craft. Shenzhou VI will orbit the Earth for five days , circling the Earth up to 80 times and the astronauts will carry out experiments during this time. They will take off their space suits and travel back and forth between two parts of the spacecraft - a re-entry capsule and an orbiter. The State television reported that the two men had eaten pineapple-filled moon cakes for breakfast. The astronaut's will land in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. China's first manned space trip two years ago made it the only the third country to launch a human into space on its own, along with Russia and the U.S. Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao congratulated all involved in the programme and said the flight had been a success. It is a great importance and source of national pride and international prestige to Beijing. The Shenzhou VI has been influence by Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, a model which was developed in the late 1960's. China hope to set up a space station within five years and then eventually put an astronaut onto the Moon. Spending on the Shenzhou project has reached $2.3bn, compared to US annual space budget of $16bn.

Monday morning and the residents of Birch Hill were woken up in the early hours by a noisy UFO, zooming over the sleeping residents. It spend half an hour hovering above the houses in Jevington and then sped towards South Hill Park, according to two witnesses. One witness, Susan Mallia said "I have never seen anything like that before. It looked like a pile of scaffolding with lights, red, blue and orange. It also had a big spotlight that was moving around." She also said she " Didn't think it was a helicopter because it sounded like a vacuum cleaner or a generator!" It woke her at 2.30.am. and her and her husband watched it for half and hour. The Bracknell News was inundated with calls about UFO's over the summer. Nowhere in Bracknell Forest was left out of the sightings. Coppid Beech Hotel, July 7th. Birch Hill, July 14th, Crown Wood, July 19th, Binfield and College Town, July 28th and then another in Binfield, August 30th. A local man, Terry Walters claims he was operated on by aliens in the 1960's and has exorcised a borough councillor's home.

Mars could be going through a climate change according to new images received by Nasa from the orbiting spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor. The photographs received show recently formed craters and gullies. Deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near the planet's south pole have shrunk for three summers in a row. According to Nasa, this is evidence to suggest climate change is in progress. The new gullies appear in an April 2005 image of a sand dune slope and a previous shot from July 2002 had no trace of them. Nasa's Michael Meyer says "To see new gullies and other changes in Mar's surface features on a time span of a few years presents us with a more active, dynamic planet than many suspected."

Nasa engineers have now concluded that flawed manufacturing caused the fuel-tank insulation failure that forced the most recent shutdown of the programme. They are hoping to have it resolved in time for a launch next May. Engineers investigating the loss of insulating foam during launch of Discovery in July, (The same problem blamed for the Columbia disaster in 2003) recently completed an interim report blaming weakness in the spray-on process and too much worker contact with the tank. They have now recommended corrective measures. 500 workers are now back on the job and Nasa needs all 2,000 back by December to have a realistic hope of a May launch. The head of the investigation team, Richard Gilbrech said "Causes of the latest insulation failures appear to be a combination of the way it was sprayed on and worker's accidentally crushing the foam during tank assembly." Workers put mats over the foam to get on it to complete some tasks. Apparently, there was no finding of workers negligence, the process was the problem. Also, there was more contact with the tank that flew on Discovery because it underwent more changes than normal. Plans to cut remaining flights of the shuttle from 28 to 19 before it is retired in 2010 will mean a small International Space Station. Luckily, the reduced shuttle flight's still allows a possible mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, but no final decision has been made yet.