Tony Reichhardt

The Many Colors of the Moon (and Earth)

Seen up close, is the lunar surface gray? Brown? How about “a cheery rose color?”

July 23, 2009

Kirk relieves Spock at NASA

Say what you will about Michael Griffin, NASA’s last Administrator—the guy was a true space cadet, wholly committed to the idea of moving humanity beyond Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years. In fact, he seemed impatient with anyone who didn’t share that commitment. He professed to be driven ...

July 23, 2009

A baby boomer in the White House

Like many people over the age of 45, Barack Obama reminisced yesterday about the Apollo 11 moon landing and what he was doing at the time. The President recalled sitting on his grandfather's shoulders in Hawaii, waving to the Apollo astronauts as they returned on recovery ships.Unlike most people, ...

July 21, 2009

Luna 15: Russia's race for the rocks

On July 17, 1969, even as Apollo 11 headed for the moon, there was still a chance the Soviet space program could salvage a modicum of pride. The race to beat the Americans to a manned landing had long been lost, even before the devastating explosion of the N1 moon rocket—the Soviet answer to NASA's...

July 17, 2009

Mission Control on the eve of the first moon launch

As a five-year-old growing up in Oklahoma in the 1940s, Jerry Elliott had a vision that he'd someday travel into space. His family was amused, but Jerry had the last laugh. He graduated with a physics degree from the University of Oklahoma—the first Native American to do so—then went to work for NA...

July 15, 2009

Barnstorming at Oshkosh

July 15, 2009

SpaceX joins the big leagues

It's probably premature to declare SpaceX an established launch company on the basis of yesterday's successful orbiting of Malaysia's Razaksat satellite (see video below). I doubt they'll want to gloat too long, given the technical and financial risks inherent in the rocket business, and the diffic...

July 14, 2009

Watch an F-18 come to life in under four minutes

Another video too cool not to pass on: Speeded-up assembly of an F/A-18F Super Hornet:

July 13, 2009

Recreating Frank Tinker's 1937 dogfight

While a group of well-wishers recently marked the 100th birthday of Spanish Civil War pilot Frank Tinker, one aficionado took it a step further by simulating one of the American-born aviator's most famous victories, a shoot-down of a Messerschmitt Bf-109 in July 1937. See the video here:

July 13, 2009

Lunar mission in a bottle

Space historian Matthew Hersch writes in:On June 16, 1968, three astronauts left their homes in sunny Houston, and with little fanfare or press attention, quietly voyaged into space. They hadn’t been astronauts for very long: physician Joe Kerwin, selected in 1965, was the first of NASA’s new scien...

July 10, 2009

The hunt for Flight 447's black box

Hope is running out that searchers will locate the flight data recorder from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic for reasons unknown on June 1.  The black box is only made to send out signals for 30 days; four ships equipped with acoustic sensors have been searching the ocean nor...

July 8, 2009

The Astronaut Tapes, Uncensored

Apollo onboard voice recordings captured the moon astronauts’ conversations when no one else was listening.

July 7, 2009

If you had been Neil Armstrong....

...what would you have said as you stepped onto the lunar surface in 1969? The folks at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in England want your suggestions (but only if you live in the U.K., sorry). They'll choose the five best recorded messages, turn them into radio signals, and bounce them ...

July 6, 2009

Good news for flying-phobes

It’s often said that flying is one of the safest ways to travel, and the numbers bear it out. According to the most recent statistics from the International Air Transport Association, there were only 0.13 fatalities per million airplane passengers last year.That means air travel was about eight tim...

July 6, 2009

Celebrating a Spanish Civil War hero

Frank Tinker, the Arkansas-born pilot who became the most famous American mercenary in the Spanish Civil War, will be honored on the centennial of his birth at a ceremony in De Witt, Arkansas, on July 11. The event is being organized by Tinker's niece, Marcia Tinker Morrison, and the Grand Prair...

July 2, 2009

One-way moon trips and other desperate measures

Space historian Matthew Hersch writes in: It is difficult to imagine it now, but in 1967, Americans and Soviets were literally dying to get to the moon. That year, three American astronauts lost their lives in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire, and a Soviet cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, died when the ree...

July 2, 2009

Step Outside

Shuck the spacecraft. 182 spacewalkers have.

July 2009

Nine new astronauts, and not a loser in the bunch

NASA's newly named Astronaut Class of 2009 had better be a patient lot, because they probably won't reach orbit anytime soon. But they can look forward to walking on the moon if and when we return there sometime in the 2020s. And even if we don't, it must be pretty satisfying to be one of only nine...

June 30, 2009

Test pilots aren't as much fun as fighter pilots

...or so thought Gemini/Apollo astronaut (and former test pilot) Michael Collins, as quoted in the 1970 book, First on the Moon: I like fighter pilots. I really do. They're good guys. As a group, I like them better than I like any other group. They're very independent people. They're not just talke...

June 25, 2009

Coast-to-coast, dawn-to-dusk, in 1924

Lieutenant Russell Maughan, a Utah-born Army pilot, winner of the Distinguished Service Cross in World War I, and holder of the world aerial speed record in 1923, tried twice that year to become the first person to fly cross-country in a single day. Both times he failed, brought down by a clogged g...

June 23, 2009