Tony Reichhardt

Tony Reichhardt is a senior editor at Air & Space.

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NASA's Bolden on International Cooperation

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden’s talk at a Women in Aerospace luncheon in Washington D.C. this week is worth watching. Four months into his tenure, Bolden seems as committed as ever to using NASA—and his own example—to push education and diversity.He also had interesting things to say about inte...

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Fear and Dread

In 45 years of photographing Mars up close, no spacecraft had ever gotten a picture of both its moons, Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Dread), together—until last month.The High Resolution Stereo Camera on Europe's Mars Express orbiter took advantage of a rare alignment to snap this image of the two moon...

Ross and Keith Smith in 1921, two years after their epic flight.

England to Australia in 1919

The Smith brothers covered 11,000 miles in 27 days.

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Hubble Goes Even Deeper

Sure it's pretty, and sure it boggles the mind, but maybe the most astonishing thing about the Hubble Deep Field image is that some scientists were initially against it. To quote from an article in our August/September 1996 issue:For Robert Williams, using the Hubble Space Telescope to peer deeply...

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NORAD's 54-year-old Tradition

NORAD, according to this history, has been tracking Santa since 1955, when a child's call to Sears Roebuck was mistakenly directed to the Continental Air Defense Command instead.Inevitable, I suppose, that in 2009 you can follow Santa on Facebook, YouTube, Google Earth and Twitter.

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Solar Airplane Takes Off

A Swiss-built solar-powered airplane made its first short "flea hop" flight yesterday, in anticipation of initial test flights next year. The Solar Impulse HB-S1A, a project of Swiss aeronautical adventurer Bertrand Piccard, flew 1,150 feet, skimming along a military runway in Zurich just a meter a...

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A WISE Way to Find Killer Asteroids

Back in 2005, the U.S. Congress ordered NASA to survey the skies and locate by 2020 nearly all (90 percent) of potentially Earth-threatening asteroids down to a diameter of 140 meters. Most objects larger than a kilometer have already been tracked. The idea is to extend the search and go after smal...

Artist's rendering of a Soyuz launch area. Click here for the full-size image.

The Soyuz Goes South

Russian rocket engineers do things a little differently from their American counterparts

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Saturn, Selenokhod, and Scott Speicher

Today's offering is a post-Thanksgiving smorgasbord of stories (okay, I'll stop with the alliteration). First, a lovely NASA video of an aurora shimmering above Saturn, with commentary by Caltech planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, who's been exploring the outer solar system since the Pioneer 10 ...

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Time Flies

We've mentioned cosmonaut Maksim Surayev's blog before, but it really is worth checking out—some of the most entertaining dispatches ever written from orbit.Even his photos have personality, like this one, of his watch floating in front of the space station's window.Here's the link.

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As the World Turns

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft took these spectacular views of a crescent Earth last week during its final close fly-by. The first frame starts at a distance of 683,000 miles. The last was taken from 198,000 miles.

Light Sails and Laser Beams

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Water on the Moon, For Real

Congratulations and apologies are due. The LCROSS team, who endured much grumbling  from Internet viewers after last month's crash into the moon failed to produce a big visible plume, is reporting what they say is clear evidence of water in a lunar crater. Not just a thimbleful, either—at least 24 ...

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Here Comes Rosetta...Again

You must need patience to work on Europe's Rosetta comet mission. Launched in 2004, the spacecraft won't arrive at its main destination, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, until 2014. That's longer than New Horizons is taking to get to Pluto. The reason is that it requires a lot of energy to meet up ...

Practicing with a mockup of the Spirit rover n the "sandbox" at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Freeing Spirit

NASA's Mars rover prepares to escape the worst trouble of its life.

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Video: Indoor Helicopter

Robot aircraft keep getting smaller and smarter. This one, built by a team at MIT, won the International Aerial Robotics Competition 5th mission challenge, which required that it enter a building, find its way around (through hallways and open windows), and send video back to home base. All autonom...

A Joyride Through the Grand Canyon

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Pilot Survey Was Flawed, Says Report

Two years ago, then-NASA Administrator Mike Griffin got into trouble by appearing to censor the results of a pilot survey that reportedly showed a higher than expected number of airplane accidents and near-accidents. Some accused NASA of squelching the truth to protect the airline industry. Congres...

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Ares I-X: "Frickin' Fantastic"

Score one for the rocket engineers.To quote Ed Mango, the launch director for today’s Ares I-X rocket test, his team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center did a “frickin’ fantastic” job on their first outing, which gathered data for the designers of NASA’s proposed Ares 1 crew launcher. It appears the eng...

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The First U.S. Military Pilot

A hundred years ago today, the U.S. military got its first pilot. On October 26, 1909, Frederick E. Humphreys, a 26-year-old Lieutenant with the Army Signal Corps, soloed for the first time in a Wright Flyer at College Park, Maryland, under the watchful eye of no less an instructor than Wilbur Wrig...

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