Editors' Picks
Area 51: Origins
America’s once-secret air base had humble beginnings.
Need for Speed
Airplanes with a mission: Fly faster.
Beyond the Moon
It’s not a place, exactly. But it could be NASA’s next destination.
The Invention of Flight
Inventors, dreamers, daredevils, charlatans: Aviation's early years had them all.
Vietnam Memoir
Stories from the war that shaped a generation.
Page 27 of 51
The Daily Planet Blog
You've Got EMALS
We told you all about electromagnetic catapults in this story from January 2007. Now the first airplane has been launched with an EMALS system: an F/A-18E Super Hornet, at a Navy test site in Lakehurst, New Jersey.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euLsg_viWW0
December 30, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
"Roger, Roger. What's our Vector, Victor?"
Proceed direct to National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The 1980 movie, "Airplane!" is one of 25 films judged to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically" significant and therefore added to the Film Registry in 2010. The spoof of 1957's "Zero Hour" was named number 10 on the Amer...
December 29, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
Concorde: Flying Supersonic
For 27 years, the Concorde carried passengers across the Atlantic Ocean at twice the speed of sound, on the very edge of space. A flight from New York to London took a mere 3 ½ hours; the supersonic aircraft flew so high and so fast that American spyplanes were ordered to stay out of the Concorde’s...
December 27, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
The Other Mrs. Simpson
Every December 17, National Air and Space Museum senior curator Tom Crouch attends the annual wreath-laying ceremony in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, to mark the anniversary of the Wright brothers' first flight. This year I tagged along. Our first stop was the Outer Banks History Center in near...
December 23, 2010
| By Caroline Sheen
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
Bella Luna
Some pilots hate flying the red-eye flights, but I kind of like them. There aren't as many planes in the air in the wee hours, and the controllers are quick to give us direct routing. Out of Las Vegas, we're often cleared direct to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, before we've even gotten to Bryce Canyo...
December 22, 2010
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
Rare Views Inside the Soyuz
I was surprised by these photos, but I shouldn't have been.Most pictures of Russian space crews in the Soyuz TMA vehicle show them squished together like sardines, sitting side by side on their launch "couches." I've always wondered how they can move their arms, let alone get anything done, during ...
December 22, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Scott Kelly's Home Video
Lots of space station astronauts have narrated video tours of their digs in space. This one, by current ISS commander Scott Kelly, struck me as more intimate, like a friend showing you around his new house:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dG9vSyUFQSpeaking of Kelly, the recent slip of his twin brot...
December 21, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Can we afford to return to the Moon?
We are almost at the end of a year that has seen major changes in our space program. We have in hand a report from a “blue ribbon” Presidential committee that concluded that Project Constellation, the architecture NASA had chosen to implement the Vision for Space Exploration, was not affordable at...
December 21, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Not Your Father's Blimp
What looks like Ronaldo's nightmare is in fact the world's largest soccer ball airship, built by E-Green Technologies of Kellyton, Alabama. Why, you ask? It seems everyone's crazy about airships these days, for everything from military surveillance to tourism. E-Green just signed a deal with NASA's...
December 17, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
New Light on the Lunar Poles
A new image released this week by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Team shows the lighting conditions of the south pole of the Moon. This new data supports the conclusions of many previous studies that areas exist on the Moon that are illuminated by the sun for more than one-half the lunar ...
December 17, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
The Astronaut's Husband
The second half of the space station Expedition 26 crew headed off to work this afternoon, as Russian Dmitry Kondratyev, Italian Paolo Nespoli, and American Cady Coleman were launched on the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Coleman, a two-time shuttle astronaut, began her six-mont...
December 15, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
It Doesn't Always Go Smoothly
There was some pretty good winter weather this past weekend, and it caused a lot of cancellations and delays. I arrived in Detroit Saturday night, flying in from São Paulo, Brazil and I was scheduled to fly right back to São Paulo at 7:30 on Sunday evening.The forecast in Detroit was for three to s...
December 15, 2010
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
Skydiving Over Google Earth
Awesome. I love the little blast of air they get at around the 48-second mark.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmxM_CknSZw
December 14, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Bang Zoom!
Engineers with the Office of Naval Research set a new world record on Friday by firing an electromagnetic railgun "cannon" with an energy of 33 megajoules, or 33 million joules. That would be enough, in an operational system, to shoot a projectile 110 miles from a ship, at speeds up to Mach 5.Here'...
December 13, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
The Big Sky
On a recent flight I was looking at my TCAS display and wondering how we ever did without this wonderful bit of equipment. TCAS stands for Traffic Collision Avoidance System, and I saw my first one in the early 90s. Prior to TCAS we had a three-prong approach to traffic avoidance: Air Traffic Contr...
December 10, 2010
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
The Human Crash Test Dummy
You had to hand it to John Stapp. When it came to exploring the limits of human tolerance, he didn't ask test subjects to try anything he wasn't willing to do himself.On this day in 1954, Stapp set the record for G-force tolerance—a whopping 46.2 Gs.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfZjN2ceVOI
December 10, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Dragon's Fire
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is now two-for-two: It launched the company's Dragon space capsule into orbit this morning.Here's video of the launch: And here's video from inside Dragon, the world's first privately developed recoverable space capsule:
December 08, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
In From the Cold
Like all good spooks, the U.S. Air Force's X-37 orbital spaceplane came in from the cold—in the middle of the night, of course—on December 3 after a seven-month inaugural orbital test flight. It's shown here at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, its primary landing spot, shortly after touchdo...
December 06, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Still, It Was a Crowd Pleaser
Four T-38 pilots from Vance AFB in Oklahoma are being investigated by the Air Force for flying too low over a college football crowd last month. They came screaming over the University of Iowa's Kinnick Stadium at an altitude of 500 feet just as the national anthem ended—but were supposed to be twi...
December 06, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
A Founding Father of Lunar Science
I learned that a titan of lunar science passed away last month. Dr. Ralph Belknap Baldwin (1912-2010) was a rare specimen – a gentleman scholar, businessman and pioneering student of the Moon. Beyond the impact of his books and papers, he influenced space history in several profound ways.Baldwin,...
December 04, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
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