Tony Reichhardt

Tony Reichhardt is a senior editor at Air & Space.

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Going Hypersonic

The field of hypersonic flight research is about to get a boost—actually, two boosts. DARPA's Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle, or HTV-2, is due to launch Thursday on a Minotaur rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (after two days of weather delays).The unpowered glider will be r...

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Solar Impulse Takes Flight

Solar Impulse, the prototype of an airplane meant to fly around the world powered only by sunlight in 2012, made its maiden flight from Payerne, Switzerland yesterday. According to flight test leader (and former astronaut) Claude Nicollier, “We reached all objectives, especially the safe landing, w...

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A Kiss Before You Spacewalk

Maybe it's the advent of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it's because there are only a few space shuttle flights left. But 50 years into the space age, NASA astronauts seem to be loosening up in the way they present themselves to the public.Case in point: this photo posted on the Twitter page of Clayto...

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F-35 Sticks the (Vertical) Landing

Lockheed Martin's F-35B Lightning II fighter hit another mark in its test program on March 18: the first vertical landing. Pilot Graham Tomlinson gently descended from a height of 150 feet after hovering for a minute above the runway at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. Watch for yourse...

The Mastcam camera on the Mars Science Laboratory rover (shown here exercising in a rock yard at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) has two "eyes" (the black squares) for binocular vision.

Cameron’s Camera

Avatar’s creator hopes to direct the first movies shot on Mars.

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Wanna Be a Tuskegee Airman?

Or at least play one? Then keep an eye on the casting calls for George Lucas's next film, Red Tails, currently shooting in San Francisco.From a recent announcement: Beau Bonneau Casting in San Francisco is currently working on a George Lucas Film "Red Tails" starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrance...

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So That's Where We Parked Them!

Scientists studying photos from the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have identified the relic Soviet Lunokhod rovers that touched down on the moon in the 1970s. Read the report here.Planetary scientists at the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow have also been playing with the LRO images. Be sure to cl...

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Helicopter Drop Tests

Crashing test dummies into walls must not be enough fun for some people, so the engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center have upped the ante. These stoic mannequins were strapped inside an MD-500 helicopter last week and dropped from a height of 35 feet to test whether a honeycomb cushion shock ...

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HST + 3D + IMAX = Wow

Think the photo's impressive? Wait 'til you see the trailer for Hubble 3D, opening Friday in IMAX theaters.

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Help for the Orbiting Astronaut

This is the kind of thing that shows just how weirdly connected we've all become.The other day Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi was up on the space station, downloading pictures via Twitter that he'd taken out the window. He asked if anybody could identify a weird hexagonal shape in Australia....

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Phobos Up Close

Given all the angst recently about NASA astronauts needing a new destination, it's good to step back and review the options. There aren't many. There's the moon, of course, and Mars. A near-Earth asteroid. And one more possibility, often forgotten—the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos.Tomorrow at 3:5...

Just imagine ejecting from one of these flying at approximately 800 mph.

The First Supersonic Bail-Out

How does it feel to eject from an aircraft going nearly 800 miles per hour?

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Race and the Space Race

PRX Radio ran an interesting piece over the weekend, narrated by former astronaut Mae Jemison, about race and the early space program. NASA and the civil rights movement came of age in the same decade, and by chance, the agency's main centers were in places like Texas, Alabama, and Florida—the hear...

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New Lightning

Last week, a third Lockheed Martin F-35B—the coolest variant of the F-35, with its ability to take off vertically then go supersonic—joined two others already undergoing flight tests at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. (It's shown here leaving the Lockheed facility in Fort Worth, Texas...

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Falcon 9 on the Launch Pad

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket—which the company hopes will usher in a new era of lower-cost commercial space travel—has arrived at its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.Engineers are checking out the vehicle's fuel, liquid oxygen, and gas pressure systems. Once they pass muster, the launch team will...

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The Capt. Marlon Green

When Marlon Green wanted a flying job with Continental Airlines more than 50 years ago, the company wouldn't give him the time of day. Now they've named an airplane after him.Green, who died last year at the age of 80, had to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court to get hired as the first Afric...

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Bill Gordon, Father of the Arecibo Observatory

William Gordon, the Cornell University engineer who dreamed up the world's largest dish antenna, died this week at the age of 92. His recollections of the Arecibo Telescope's early days were included in a story that ran in our October 1997 issue, not long after the observatory was upgraded with new...

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The Astronaut Olympics

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And Now, Starring the Sun

Quick, what's the most photogenic object in our solar system? Earth? Yeah, pretty. Saturn? Lovely rings. But for sheer drama and majesty, it's hard to beat pictures of the sun taken from spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO.Those satellites are about to be eclipsed (sorry) by the Solar Dynamics Observat...

The Price of Human Spaceflight

NASA’s now defunct Constellation program came with a $9 billion price tag. Is there a cheaper way?

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