Fireball Over Indonesia
The Near-Earth Object office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports on an October 8 fireball over Indonesia, with a link (below) to a local TV news story.Fireballs are dramatic, but not as rare as you'd think. An object this size (about 10 meters in diameter) comes along every few years, on av...
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Club Zvezda
When did cosmonauts get so hip?
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The First Parachute Jump
Garnerin took the leap over Paris, in 1797.
Video: Space Station Flyover
On the day of the LCROSS lunar impact, a NASA ground camera normally used to track space shuttle launches caught this video of the International Space Station passing over the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Here's how to see the station for yourself, from your own backyard. (Video: NASA)
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Ares I-X, One Week and Counting
NASA has a new rocket on the launch pad for the first time in almost 30 years.The Ares I-X, the first test of the new Ares rocket design, is scheduled for October 27 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This first flight is meant to demonstrate control and staging of the Ares 1 crew launcher, ...
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1966: The (Real) First Moon Landing
Surveyor 1 is still sitting pretty on the lunar surface
They're Relieved on Nibiru, Too
If you know children who are sick with worry about the supposed end of the world in 2012, here's the antidote: a six-page brief by NASA Ames Research Center astrobiologist David Morrison explaining why the whole Mayan calendar scare is a load of nonsense.The doomsday scenario, in case you hadn't he...
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Richard Whitcomb (1921-2009)
If Richard Whitcomb wasn't the most important aerospace engineer of the past 50 years, he was certainly on the short list. The veteran of NASA's Langley Research Center died on Tuesday at the age of 88. Read about his contributions to aeronautics here, or watch a NASA-produced video at this link.By...
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The Coming Crash
Friendly warning: Do not be in the moon's Cabeus Crater tomorrow morning. At 7:31 eastern time, a giant, two-and-a-half ton empty rocket stage will come crashing down from the sky at 1.5 miles a second. Four minutes later, another, smaller spacecraft will hit near the same spot. What the...? Ahh, i...
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Alfred Nobel's rocket camera
Alfred Nobel, the Swedish millionaire who originated the world's most prestigious science prizes, was also a compulsive tinkerer and filer of patents. Among the fields that caught his interest was rocketry, perhaps not surprising for the man who invented dynamite.Nobel wasn't the first to think of ...
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Video: Airborne Laser Test
Boeing and the U.S. Air Force begin testing the Advanced Tactical Laser.
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Who broke the sound barrier?
Was it really Chuck Yeager? Or did George Welch beat him to it? If so, it happened on this day in 1947.
Send up the clowns
Okay, that was one of the strangest sendoffs in launch history. Not only did space tourist and Cirque Du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté keep putting on his red clown nose, the whole crew periodically broke into the cheesy pop song "Mammy Blue" as they were getting ready to board their Soyuz rocket f...
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Gas stations in space
The debate over what kind of rocket to use for NASA's exploration program has become so clouded by politics and salesmanship that it's hard for outsiders to tell any more which approach would be best, or even if it's still possible to send people beyond Earth orbit. The Augustine commission says it...
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Earhart's goggles go on the block
Normally, the folks at Profiles in History, based outside Los Angeles, auction off Hollywood memorabilia. On October 8-9, they'll sell what they're billing as "the single most important flight-worn aviation artifact to ever be offered at public auction"—the goggles worn by Amelia Earhart during her...
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Robot airplane goes AWOL, gets shot down
The future of aerial warfare
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The rivers of Titan
If I were running the space program—which is unlikely, I admit—Saturn's moon Titan would be very high on the list of destinations for the next major planetary mission. Sure, Mars is appealing, largely because of its similarity to Earth.But take a look at this radar image of Titan's northern polar r...
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Devils’ Advocates
Some people go to Las Vegas to gamble, others to learn about Mars.
Japan's new space truck
There's been a lot of fretting in space policy circles about the launch "gap" after the U.S. space shuttle retires, and how NASA will manage to ferry astronauts to the space station when it has no space vehicle of its own. Equally important is how cargo will be delivered. Now that six people are l...
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