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A New Record for Mars 500
When I saw this new image of the six guys locked inside the Mars 500 mission simulation chamber in Moscow, I feared for their mental health.But they seem to be doing fine. In fact, they just broke the previous Mars chamber endurance record:
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SETI @ 50: Are We Getting Anywhere?
Most people date the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) to Frank Drake's Project Ozma, conducted in 1960 using the giant dish at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia.Today through Wednesday, at an NRAO workshop, SETI-ologists will review where th...
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The Day(s) Nobody Flew
September 11, 2001 was not the first time that all air traffic in the United States was halted.
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Plymouth Rock: 90 Days in a Minivan
At first I was excited to read press reports of a Lockheed-Martin concept for a bare-bones human asteroid mission, using a pair of Orion capsules yoked together. Finally, a near-term plan! Because the Orion is mostly built, the first "Plymouth Rock" mission could fly as early as 2016, nine years ea...
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Pégoud Flies Upside Down, 1913
French aviator Adolphe Pégoud ranks as one of the best and bravest pilots in history, and he knew how to wow a crowd. On this day in 1913 he introduced a trick that scared even other pioneers of flight—he flew upside down, for an audience at the Juvisy aerodrome outside Paris.A correspondent descri...
Sightings: Guess That Airplane
Sightings: Guess That Airplane
Stripped-Down Spaceflight in Denmark
However the Copenhagen Suborbitals project turns out, you have to give these people points for nerve. The eventual plan is to launch a human to an altitude of 100 kilometers inside a capsule barely large enough to fit one person, standing up. For the moment, the Danish team would be happy just to l...
The First Human-Powered Flight
The Gossamer Condor relied on pedal power.
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Remembering Belka and Strelka
The first living creatures to venture into orbit and return safely
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Astronomy's To Do List
Every ten years or so, the nation's astronomers put their heads (actually committees) together to come up with a collective wish list for the projects they'd like to see funded over the next decade. Politicians tend to like this method of setting scientific priorities, as it saves them from choosin...
He May Be a Smart Physicist, But...
Here's Stephen Hawking, commenting on humanity’s future: ...Our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only c...
Zephyr Goes for the Record
With UAVs becoming more capable and taking on more missions each day, military users are clamoring for one feature in particular: longer dwell time in the air.DARPA's Vulture program aims to build an unmanned vehicle that could stay up for five years. That's still quite a stretch, considering that ...
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The Air Force in 2030
Forecasting technology is a notoriously tricky business. In spite of all the predictions, we still don't have fusion power or flying cars, but in 2010 you can kick around a virtual soccer ball using a handheld camera phone, and who saw that coming?It's the job of the Air Force Chief Scientist and h...
NASA's Next Mars Rover
The Curiosity rover, scheduled for launch to Mars next year, took its first test drive last week.
SpaceShipTwo Gets a Pilot
Some nice scenes here of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo (now known as VSS Enterprise) on a recent captive carry flight—with a pilot (Peter Siebold) onboard for the first time.
Hang Time
Designers of spy planes have come up with any number of ways to increase dwell time over a target
Technology Seeding
There's a philosophical war going on in space policy circles these days, between those who believe that grand, ambitious missions drive invention (Apollo), and those who believe it's the other way around (DARPA).Honestly, I think either approach can work, given wise management. But NASA's new direc...
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The Sun Also Sets
...which is why any solar-powered airplane designed to circle the globe has to be able to fly at night, too.Switzerland's Solar Impulse team checked that off their to-do list yesterday.Next up in 2012: an Atlantic crossing in a more advanced prototype to be built next year.
Scenes From Star City
With more NASA astronauts Twittering and YouTubing these days, you can get all kinds of insider views of the spacefarer's life if you're willing to rummage around the Web a bit. Scott Kelly is training for a space station tour beginning in September, and over the last year has posted video scenes ...
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Aviation's "It" Girl
Airplanes and The Movies came of age at the same time, and Harriet Quimby—best known as the first American woman to earn a pilot's license—had a keen interest in both. In fact, by the time she fatally crashed her Blériot XI on this day in 1912, there was little the adventure-loving 37-year-old hadn...
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