Tony Reichhardt

Tony Reichhardt is a senior editor at Air & Space.

From images sent by the Huygens probe in 2005, scientists created this view of Titan from 30,000 feet — about the altitude at which an airplane would cruise.

Titan Air

Saturn's mysterious moon may have airplanes in its future.

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Sixty Years After Korea

The Korean War often gets lost in the commemorative gap between World War II and Vietnam, but it was the first major conflict of the Jet Age, and has plenty of lore of its own. The war began 60 years ago this month, when North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel to invade South Korea. Here's a...

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IKAROS Unfurled

We had hoped that Japan's IKAROS solar sail would work as advertised, and it did. Here's an animated image of the fully deployed sail, taken by a "separation camera" from a short distance away.In other happenings: The Hayabusa asteroid sample return capsule came home in spectacular style last wee...

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Hayabusa Limps Home

If Hayabusa were a human explorer instead of a spacecraft, the first thing it might do on Sunday after returning to Earth from a seven-year voyage is pour a stiff drink.Japan's first mission to an asteroid has generally been a success, and a major step up for the nation's planetary program. But man...

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Admit It, You Want One of These

Engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have built a "Distributed Flight Array"—self-assembling, yet—that could someday be used to airlift objects. See it in action:

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Good Times for Ken Bowersox

Most of the credit for Friday's near-perfect launch of the new Falcon 9 rocket rightly goes to Elon Musk, whose unusual blend of vision, competence, and almost compulsive candor (what other aerospace executive has the nerve to a) publish fixed launch prices, and b) openly criticize a U.S. Senator?)...

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All Eyes on Falcon 9

SpaceX CEO and chief designer Elon Musk could be forgiven if he feels a little under-appreciated on the eve of his Falcon 9 rocket's first launch (liftoff is scheduled for 11 a.m. tomorrow from Cape Canaveral).The guy has been trying his damnedest for several years to bring down the cost of reac...

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520 Days in a Can

Three Russians, a Chinese, a Frenchman and an Italian walk into a simulation chamber...and don't come out for 17 months.That's pretty much the idea behind Mars 500, which starts tomorrow and aims to be the highest-fidelity simulation of a Mars mission ever conducted—as well as the first to last as ...

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Holiday Sampler

For the Memorial Day weekend, an assortment of news from the world of air and space:►  The field of hypersonic flight has a new record: The Air Force's X-51A Waverider reached Mach 5 in a 200-second scramjet engine burn over the Pacific on Wednesday. Video below:►  What looked at first like a sma...

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Why They Stopped Flying

The risk to airplanes from the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland was more than just the danger of jet engines shutting down in flight. The ash could also have led to long-term damage that's harder to spot. After a NASA DC-8 flew through a volcanic ash cloud in 2000, researchers...

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Waverider Gears Up for First Flight

The Air Force's X-51A Waverider is being readied for its first hypersonic test flight on Tuesday, May 25. If all goes well, the scramjet-powered vehicle will fly for five minutes and hit Mach 6 before coming down into the ocean off the California coast. Project engineers hope to collect lots of dat...

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Japan Sets Sail for Venus

While the U.S. space program is mired in political arguments over how to reach Earth orbit (something we've known how to do for 50 years), Japan's space agency JAXA, with far less money, is about to take a small but noteworthy step into the future.An HII-A launcher is scheduled to lift off from the...

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A New Arm for the Space Station

As the space station gets its finishing touches (Atlantis carries up a new Russian storage module on tomorrow's STS-132 mission), we'll see some new gadgets come into play. One is the European Robotic Arm, due to be installed on the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module in 2012. A spare elbow for ...

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Pad Abort Test: The Videos

NASA has released better video of the recent launch abort system test in New Mexico. Some spectacular views here.

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Voyager 2 Skips a Beat

Flight directors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are troubleshooting a glitch with the distant Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is still sending back signals from the outer solar system 33 years after it was launched. According to a JPL release, ground controllers haven't received inte...

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Behold Excalibur

Among the more intriguing commercial space vehicles on the drawing board is Excalibur Almaz, whose backers propose to use leftover vehicles built for a Soviet military space station program that died aborning in the 1970s. The principals in the company include Art Dula, an old hand in the field of ...

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Robonaut Gets His Mission

So we thought the last of NASA's rookie astronauts had flown, leaving only veterans on the final few space shuttle flights.Not so fast.One last rookie will be on board space shuttle Discovery when it blasts off in September for the STS-133 mission.After years languishing as a laboratory-only projec...

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Back to Normal

After being shut down due to worries about volcanic ash choking jet engines, air traffic resumed over Europe last week, as seen in this visualization produced by the folks at ITO World.

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Manhigh Pioneer David Simons, 1922-2010

Six weeks before Sputnik 1 ushered in the Space Age, and four years before Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 flight, an adventurous young biomedical researcher named David Simons climbed to the edge of space inside a pressurized capsule, as part of a project called Manhigh. As we wrote in an article publishe...

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The Sun in Hi-Def

New hi-definition movies of the Sun, from NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory. Mesmerizing.

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