The New vehicle "LauncherOne" to transform small satellite for tourism is in final leg of test flights

The Great Farnborough "International Air Show 2012", Virgin Galactic, the world's first commercial spaceline, Today they announced "LauncherOne", a new air-launched rocket specifically designed to deliver small satellites into orbit. With substantial funding already raised from Virgin Galactic's partner aabar Investments PJS, and with commercial flights of this new orbital launch vehicle expected to begin by 2016, Virgin Galactic aims to offer frequent and dedicated launches at the world's lowest prices. Virgin Galactic also announced that four private companies have already put down deposits as future LauncherOne customers, expressing their intent to purchase a total of several dozen launches, which would exceed the level of early commitment of any previous new launch vehicle. 

The New LauncherOne will be a two-stage vehicle capable of carrying up to 500 pounds that is 225 kilograms to orbit for prices below $10 million. And,the rocket will be launched from Virgin Galactic's proven WhiteKnightTwo,it is uniquely capable aircraft also designed to carry along SpaceShipTwo aloft to begin her suborbital missions.Very thanks to the extreme flexibility of air launch, Virgin Galactic's customers will enjoy reduced infrastructure costs in addition to the wide range of possible launch locations tailored to individual mission requirements and weather conditions in this mission.

NASA’s SUMI: to Observe Magnetic Fields on the Sun

On July 5, NASA will launch a mission called the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation or SUMI, to study the intricate, constantly changing attractive fields on the sun in a hard-to-observe region of the sun's low atmosphere called the chromospheres. SUMI will launch from White Sands Missile series in New Mexico on a Black Brant rocket. The flight will last about eight minutes total.

Magnetic fields, and the intense magnetic energy they help marshal, lie at the heart of how the sun can create huge explosions of light such as solar flares and eruptions of particles such as coronal mass ejections. While there are already instruments both on the ground and flying in space – that can measure these fields, each is constrained to observe the fields on a particular layer of the sun's surface or atmosphere. 

This higher layer of the chromospheres is known as the transition region because the chromospheres transitions here into the part of the sun's atmosphere called the corona -- and it is a region that is dominated by the magnetic fields and in which solar material heats up dramatically forming the corona and the base of the solar wind.