As the Kennedy Space Center prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Florida Power & Light looks back at its long-standing partnership with the space agency, dating back to 1965. That's when FPL built its Cape Canaveral Power Plant to help fuel the needs of the early space program. It's a partnership built on innovation and investments in technology. Now FPL prepares for its biggest innovation to date -- the launch of its new, highly efficient Cape Canaveral Clean Energy Center. The project, scheduled to come online in 2013, will help power the future needs of the space program and the people of the Space Coast.

Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event--the transit of Venus across the face of the sun. This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years. The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117. The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum. The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light. 304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.

Twenty-seven years ago, Sally Ride became the first American woman in
space on Jun 18, 1983. She accomplished this historic milestone when
she flew aboard Space Shuttle Challenger as a mission specialist for
the six-day STS-7 mission. Ride, a southern California native, was also
a mission specialist for a second shuttle mission, STS 41-G in October of 1984.
Since leaving the astronaut corps in 1987, Ride, who has a Ph.D. in physics,
has taught at various universities and authored several books. In 2001,
she founded Sally Ride Science, an innovative program dedicated to promote
student interest in mathematics, science and technology. She is a member
of the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame, and
has received numerous awards, including two NASA Space Flight Medals.
(Interview conducted April 21, 2008)

Flying from Orlando, FL the crew recorded on video rare footage of Discovery's final launch as it embarks on STS-133.

Atlas V roars off the launch pad sending NASA's next Mars rover toward the Red Planet. The launch date was November 26, 2011 and the landing in Mars is scheduled for August 6, 2012.

NASA's test flights of the X-48B, an experimental "blended wing" aircraft, indicate that flying is about to take a radical turn.

A revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. With thanks to Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran, Andrew Tidby and Evan Hadfield for all their hard work.

Dr Richard Fisher, head of NASA's Heliophysics Division said: "We know it's coming but we don't know how bad it's going to be." But what NASA is not telling the general public, is what you should be doing to get ready. Unless you live under a rock, you are beginning to notice that major news agencies as well as talk radio have started to cover the story, detailing exactly what NASA's warning is actually telling the public. If NASA is indeed right and we do get a direct hit from a super solar storm, "The Economic Damage In The United States Alone Will Be Twenty Times Greater Then Hurricane Katrina That Hit New Orleans" say experts. What NASA is not outright telling the general population is that if the earth in fact gets a direct hit by a truly big solar storm producing super x-class solar flares, (Coronal Mass Ejection or CME) ...it will cripple the world in more ways then we can possibly imagine, as it will cause nearly every electronic device to no longer work until it gets fixed. Imagine no more properly working cell phones, cars, trucks, planes, ships, computers, TV, radio, iPods, or game machines, let alone no more advanced medical services. Since more then likely there will be no electric power in most of the world for many months on end, there will be no modern banking system in place, no New York Stock Exchange, credit cards will be worthless and what cash, silver and gold you have will be king. Food stores will soon be looted in the name of survival, most gas stations can't pump gas for what cars and trucks that might still be running. All forms of radio communication will no longer work during this period, making it difficult if not impossible for local law enforcement to maintain law and order, and a National Marshall Law = (Rex-84) will be ordered that the public will be mostly unaware of. Before you know it, the the city water and sewer system will stop working. If you are on an electric well pump, you lose your water right away, (unless it's a hand pump) where as those in the city might have a few days to a week or so before they lose all their water pressure. Even worse, those who don't have at least twelve to twenty four months of secured food and water, starvation will set in, which stands to kill hundreds of millions world wide if not billions; where as third world countries will not be as adversely effected. *Remember... most of the world population no longer supply their own food, rather people buy it. If food trucks don't run, then they cant get the food to the stores. Even if somehow cars and trucks still worked, gas stations will be without power for months and thus unable to pump gas without having to run a costly generator. No doubt what gas their is available will be top dollar, easily exceeding ten US dollars per gallon in many locations world wide. It will be one big nightmare if the earth takes a direct hit from a super CME, thus changing billions of lives forever. Leading countries like the US would be temporally setback well over a hundred and fifty years. But there are numerous things we can do to easily survive the coming solar storm rather then us becoming a victim.

Soyuz,a Russian spacecraft carrying a three-man crew blasted off Friday from a launch pad in the steppes of Kazakhstan, for the first time taking a shorter path to the International Space Station. Instead of the two-day approach maneuver used by Soyuz spacecraft in the past, this journey to the station would take NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russians Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin just under six hours.

Though it doesn't look like a nice place to live now, Mars may have had an atmosphere more like ours on Earth! But how did it lose it? One way a planet can lose its atmosphere is through a process called 'sputtering.' In this process, atoms are knocked away from the atmosphere due to impacts from energetic particles.