VENTURE CAPITAL POST

Boeing Co (BA.N) has completed a key review of its design for a new commercial venture to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, making it the only one of four rival bidders to finish the NASA work on time, company officials said on Thursday.

Washington, US-based software giant Microsoft acquired Wellington, New Zealand-based cloud computing firm GreenButton for an undisclosed amount to incorporate it into the Azure public cloud platform to give companies remote access to software.

After announcing via press conference that its Falcon 9 rocket has successfully made a soft landing in the ocean, Elon Musk expressed his desire for Space X and other private companies to join the bidding for military rocket launch contracts.

After helping 3 million people in the Philippines and Paraguay get access to the Internet, social media giant Facebook launched the Connectivity Lab to build drones and lasers that will help more people get affordable Internet access.

Planetary Ventures, the shell firm that Google infrequently uses for its real estate deals, has won the right to lease Moffett Field and Hangar One.

In a bid to bring home the $20 million prize money in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, Penn State launched a crowdfunding campaign on Rockethub to raise $400,000 by February to build its own moon rover prototype.

The Government Accountability Office said the spinoff of SAIC Inc invalidated the health services contract awarded to it by the National Aeronautics Space Administration, Bloomberg reported.

California, US-based firm Planet Labs has closed a fresh $52 million from a recent funding round to launch small satellites into space and gather data about the Earth.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will turn over one of its idled space-shuttle launch pad to Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), according to officials on Friday.

Investors remain inclined to take markets higher in the absence of anything that would suggest equities should fall. The market seems to have hit a stage where strong data helps and weak data affirms the Fed's intentions to keep policy accommodative, which also helps stocks.

The crews of Boeing, US Energy Department and NASA have been spread across a Cold War rocket test site to clean up and prevent contamination.