airBaltic teamed up with experimental ballet choreographer to rehearse world’s first ballet “The Nutcracker” with airplane. And yes, you guessed it right, there is no plane more fit for the job than airBaltic’s new Bombardier CS300.

Try new things in 2017! Happy Holidays!

airBaltic and ZParks.lv team

Martin Gauss, Chief Executive Officer of airBaltic: “CS300 is a great aircraft, and a great improvement for our customers this Christmas.  We are delighted to announce that the historic first airBaltic commercial flight with Bombardier CS300 will link Riga with Amsterdam.”

The new CS300 aircraft with a total of 145 seats, offers excellent flying experience with such benefits for passengers as wider seats, larger windows, more hand luggage space in the cabin, improved lavatories and other. New aircraft is also much quieter – with four times smaller noise footprint. Moreover, at the moment, it is the greenest commercial aircraft in the world, as it is the first aircraft to have a transparent declaration of the life-cycle environmental impact, helping to reduce CO₂ and NO_X emissions by 20% and 50% respectively.

airBaltic is the launch operator for the CS300 aircraft, and has ordered 20 CS300 aircraft.

“We were generally very pleased with the high quality of the university proposals and the amount of effort associated with preparing them,” said Arno Wielders, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Mars One. “Seed itself is uniquely inspiring since this would be the first time a plant will be grown on Mars.”

The Winning Team - Seed aims to germinate the first seed on Mars in order to contribute to the development of life support systems and provide a deeper understanding of plant growth on Mars. The payload will consist of an external container, which provides protection from the harsh environment, and interior container, which will hold several seed cassettes. The seeds will stem from the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, which is commonly used in space plant studies. After landing, the seeds inside the cassette will be provided with conditions for germination and seedling growth. The growth will then be recorded using images transmitted back to Earth.

"We are really pleased to be the selected project among so many excellent ideas. We are thrilled to be the first to send life to Mars! This will be a great journey that we hope to share with you all!" said Teresa Araújo, Seed team member.

Seed consists of four bioengineering students from the University of Porto and two PhD students from MIT Portugal and the University of Madrid. The team is supported by Dr. Maria Helena Carvalho, plant researcher at IBMC and Dr. Jack van Loon, from the VU Medical Center, VU-University in Amsterdam, and support scientist at ESTEC-ESA. Seed benefits from scientific and technical support from several advisers, whose expertise range from biological systems to spacecraft development and validation. Read more about Seed here.

An in-depth technical analysis of the winning proposal will be conducted to ensure that the winner has a feasible plan and that their payload can be integrated on the 2018 Mars lander. Mars One and its advisers will contribute to the analysis by thoroughly and critically examining the Seed proposal.

If Seed runs into any issues regarding feasibility or can not stick to the schedule, Mars One will fall back on the runner ups of the university competition. The second and third placed projects are Cyano Knights and Lettuce on Mars.

 U.S. astronauts once again will travel to and from the International Space Station from the United States on American spacecraft under groundbreaking contracts NASA announced Tuesday. The agency unveiled its selection of Boeing and SpaceX to transport U.S. crews to and from the space station using their CST-100 and Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively, with a goal of ending the nation’s sole reliance on Russia in 2017.

The companies selected to provide this transportation capability and the maximum potential value of their FAR-based firm fixed-price contracts are:

• The Boeing Company, Houston, $4.2 billion
• Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Hawthorne, California, $2.6 billion

The contracts include at least one crewed flight test per company with at least one NASA astronaut aboard to verify the fully integrated rocket and spacecraft system can launch, maneuver in orbit, and dock to the space station, as well as validate all its systems perform as expected. Once each company’s test program has been completed successfully and its system achieves NASA certification, each contractor will conduct at least two, and as many as six, crewed missions to the space station. These spacecraft also will serve as a lifeboat for astronauts aboard the station.

Source: NASA

Latvian airline airBaltic has become the world’s first airline to accept Bitcoin as payment for its tickets to 60 destinations in Europe, Middle East, Russia and the CIS.

Martin Gauss, airBaltic Chief Executive Officer: “airBaltic has been ranked among TOP 10 most innovative airlines globally. Introducing the Bitcoin payment option is a part of our innovative approach to service with a central focus on our customer.”

airBaltic accepts Bitcoin as payment for tickets on its website www.airbaltic.com. The ticket prices on the website are displayed in euros. When airBaltic customers pay for their flight, their Bitcoins are converted into euros at the current exchange rate. To make accepting Bitcoin possible, airBaltic teamed up with Bitpay, a third-party payment processor that converts Bitcoins into euros. The Bitcoin payment option is available when purchasing the cheapest tickets, known as airBaltic Basic class.

Bitcoin is a software-based payment system introduced in 2009. Payments are recorded in a public ledger and bitcoin is its unit of account. Bitcoin payments are accepted by such companies as WordPress.com, Overstock.com, Expedia, Dell, and others.