Tony Reichhardt

Tony Reichhardt is a senior editor at Air & Space.

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Photo Op for Soyuz

Busy days in Earth orbit.Space Shuttle Discovery is set to make its last voyage tomorrow, with liftoff planned for 4:50 p.m. Florida time. If all goes according to plan, Europe's Johannes Kepler unmanned cargo vehicle will have docked with the space station earlier in the day (at 10:45 U.S. Eastern...

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Kepler's Catch

When a veteran planet hunter like Debra Fischer calls it the most momentous discovery since 51 Peg, you know it must be big.In 1995, scientists found the first planet circling a normal star outside our solar system—an unassuming yellow dwarf called 51 Pegasi. In the 16 years since, they've identifi...

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Junk Mail From Above

Once you get used to the slightly overcaffeinated host, this is a pretty cool project —to drop a bunch of paper airplanes from a high-altitude balloon and see where they land. The team launched their balloon earlier this month, as the video shows. But, from what I can tell on their website and Twit...

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A Guppy with Talons

No, it's not some freakish genetics experiment. It's NASA's Super Guppy transport hauling around a couple of T-38s. Read about it here.

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The Return of Space Tourism

We probably shouldn't call them space tourists, even in a headline. The seven people who have visited the International Space Station as paying customers of the Virginia-based booking agency Space Adventures all worked very hard—before, during, and after their flights. None of them spent their time...

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The Budget News From 1911

As in any year, there are winners and losers in the 2012 Pentagon budget announced yesterday. The Defense Department plans to buy more Reaper unmanned drones, but the Marine Corps' short takeoff and landing version of the F-35 was put on two-year "probation," and may not happen at all. Pretty stand...

The crews of the first and last shuttle missions. From left: Doug Hurley, Bob Crippen and John Young of STS-1, STS-135 commander Chris Ferguson, Sandy Magnus, and Rex Walheim.

Shuttlenauts

The faces behind the visors

Navy Tests Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS)

You've Got EMALS

The EMALS systems gets off the ground, literally

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Rare Views Inside the Soyuz

I was surprised by these photos, but I shouldn't have been.Most pictures of Russian space crews in the Soyuz TMA vehicle show them squished together like sardines, sitting side by side on their launch "couches." I've always wondered how they can move their arms, let alone get anything done, during ...

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Scott Kelly's Home Video

Lots of space station astronauts have narrated video tours of their digs in space. This one, by current ISS commander Scott Kelly, struck me as more intimate, like a friend showing you around his new house:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dG9vSyUFQSpeaking of Kelly, the recent slip of his twin brot...

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Not Your Father's Blimp

What looks like Ronaldo's nightmare is in fact the world's largest soccer ball airship, built by E-Green Technologies of Kellyton, Alabama. Why, you ask? It seems everyone's crazy about airships these days, for everything from military surveillance to tourism. E-Green just signed a deal with NASA's...

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The Astronaut's Husband

The second half of the space station Expedition 26 crew headed off to work this afternoon, as Russian Dmitry Kondratyev, Italian Paolo Nespoli, and American Cady Coleman were launched on the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Coleman, a two-time shuttle astronaut, began her six-mont...

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Skydiving Over Google Earth

Awesome.  I love the little blast of air they get at around the 48-second mark.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmxM_CknSZw

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Bang Zoom!

Engineers with the Office of Naval Research set a new world record on Friday by firing an electromagnetic railgun "cannon" with an energy of 33 megajoules, or 33 million joules. That would be enough, in an operational system, to shoot a projectile 110 miles from a ship, at speeds up to Mach 5.Here'...

John Stapp executes his record-breaking 1954 rocket sled run

The Human Crash Test Dummy

The man who set the G-force tolerance record

South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk, 40, ended up in the United States because, he says, it's where great things happen. Musk is gambling that his company, SpaceX, can change the world with its Falcon rockets and Dragon capsules by carrying cargo, and eventually people, to orbit.

Dragon's Fire

Iowa Hawkeye fly over football game

Still, It Was a Crowd Pleaser

T-38 pilots fly precariously close over a football game at the University of Iowa

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Heavens Above

We've come a long way from Madalyn Murray O'Hair.She was, you'll recall, the activist atheist who campaigned against government sanctioning of religion—including NASA astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968.But times have changed. Even Russians are now carryi...

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Life As We Didn't Know It

Score another one for the extremophiles.Biologists had already discovered organisms that can survive everything from high levels of radiation to vacuum to total darkness. Now they've found one that uses arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus, one of the six elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxy...

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A Steamy Earthlike Planet?

Having already found more than 500 planets circling distant stars, scientists are getting better at understanding what they're made of. A group led by Jacob Bean at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports in this week's Nature that they've analyzed the atmosphere of a planet only sl...

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