Shuttle Program's Value: $12 Billion
This line from a recent NASA Inspector General report jumped out at me: In addition to managing Shuttle funding challenges, the transition and retirement activities associated with the end of the Shuttle Program present one of the largest such efforts ever undertaken by NASA. The Shuttle Program is...
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Nanosail-D Sets Sail
NASA's modest solar sail demonstrator launches on a Minotaur 4 rocket.
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Chinese Moon
What impresses me most about the new photos of the moon taken by the Chinese Chang’e-2 orbiter is not their beauty (although they are pretty) nor their sharpness (NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter returns higher resolution images). It's the fact that they were unveiled by Premier Wen Jiabao (left...
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Western Low-Fly Zones: Not in My Sky
The Air Force is looking for places in the American West where pilots can practice flying special operations missions over terrain similar to the rugged mountains of Afghanistan. One proposal would call for a new Low Altitude Tactical Navigation area straddling the border of Colorado and New Mexico...
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Air Force Drones Cut to Wide Angle
U.S. Air Force drones that serve as the aerial eyes of American combat troops in Afghanistan are about to widen their view.A multi-camera system called "Gorgon Stare" (named for the Medusa's deadly gaze, which turns onlookers to stone) will be installed on unmanned Reaper aircraft and deployed t...
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Close-Ups of Hartley 2
The first close-up photos of Comet Hartley 2 came in this morning from NASA's Epoxi spacecraft. Dramatic!
Too Many Astronauts?
As the space shuttle program winds down, an obvious question faces NASA: How many astronauts will it need in an era of drastically reduced flights? Only three Americans live on the space station at any one time, typically, and those slots come open just twice a year. As for a moon base or Mars miss...
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Data Clippers
Now this is a charming idea, and maybe a handy one too – fleets of solar sails delivering pictures of distant worlds back to the home planet.Data is a valuable commodity in the Information Age, just as spices and silk were in centuries past. So Joel Poncy and his team at Thales Alenia Space have im...
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Aboriginal Astronomers Saw Stellar Blowup in 1843
The idea that ancient cultures were keen observers of the night sky is neither surprising nor new: think of the Druids, the Mayans, and the Babylonians. But most examples from the annals of archaeoastronomy seem to come from the northern hemisphere.Now a team of researchers from Macquarie Universit...
The Nedelin Disaster
A rush job ended with nearly 100 lives lost when a fully-fueled rocket ignited on the launchpad during testing.
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Alberto's Big Race
Around the Eiffel Tower in 1901.
First Flight for VSS Enterprise
Virgin Galactic's suborbital spaceship, the VSS Enterprise, made its first piloted free flight and landing yesterday in Mojave, California. Pete Siebold was at the controls.
Bon Voyage, Soyuz TMA-01M
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka are due to launch to the space station at 7:10 P.M., U.S. Eastern time today, from the Baikonur launch center in Kazakhstan. Fellow astronaut Ron Garan is at Baikonur with Kelly, providing live commentary via his...
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Looking for the High Life
In the wake of several misleading news headlines, researchers at Cranfield University in the U.K. have had to set the record straight: No, they're not looking for aliens in Earth's atmosphere.But they are looking for microbes floating around in the stratosphere, at altitudes up to 22 miles. The...
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China Returns to the Moon
China's ambitions in space are often exaggerated and held up as a threat to U.S. preeminence in the field, mostly as a scare tactic to shake more money for NASA out of Congress. A lot of the huffing and puffing you can safely ignore. But the Chinese have made solid progress over the last decade in ...
Russian Animals in Space
A documentary celebrates the famous and not-so-famous pioneers of spaceflight.
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"Ah, Dr. Mach!"
On this day in 1953, 21-year-old North Korean pilot No Kum-Sok astonished the American flyers at Kimpo Air Base in South Korea by landing in the middle of their runway and surrendering—thus becoming the first MiG pilot to defect to the West. In his fascinating 1996 book, A MiG-15 to Freedom, No (w...
Swarming Over Switzerland
This looks like fun work.And the people on the SMAVNET Project think they set a record for the largest number of flying robots (10) deployed at a single time outdoors.
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