Editors' Picks
What the astronauts really said
Apollo "onboard voice" recordings captured the moon astronauts' conversations -- cussing and all -- when no one else was listening.
Drones for Hire
The newest eyes in the sky are drawing the attention of power companies, conservation groups, and the ACLU.
Five Reasons to Like NASA’s Asteroid Retrieval Mission
So it's not the Moon or Mars. Get over it.
The Invention of Flight
Inventors, dreamers, daredevils, charlatans: Aviation's early years had them all.
Disaster at Xichang
An eyewitness speaks publicly for the first time about history’s worst launch accident.
Page 21 of 51
The Daily Planet Blog
Saving Gas Over the Top
An Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker may haul more than 31,000 gallons to refuel other aircraft, but for long-haul missions, it needs to watch every drop of its own fuel. That’s why, when a KC-135 crew flew from Washington state to Kyrgyzstan over the North Pole last month, the Air Force brass was pumped. It wasn’t [...]
July 28, 2011
| By Roger Mola
The Daily Planet Blog
Stop That Stick Figure
The Transportation Security Administration has finally faced the naked truth. After the agency’s advanced imaging technology (AIT) airport scanners stirred controversy by exposing too much of a passenger’s human form, the TSA will switch to new software that makes the images less realistic. Screening agents—who had been isolated in a remote closet to view the [...]
July 25, 2011
| By Roger Mola
The Daily Planet Blog
Goodbye, Shuttle
The space shuttle has been well eulogized in recent weeks, and we’ve already said our own farewells in print and on the web. So no need for another Grand Tribute. Still….I can’t resist a couple of parting thoughts on this final day of the 30-year shuttle program. The safety of the shuttle can be debated, [...]
July 21, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Whistling in the Airlock
I learn something new about the astronaut business on every mission. During their spacewalk last week, space station residents Mike Fossum and Ron Garan did some whistling while they were inside the Quest airlock in their spacesuits, waiting for the pressure to drop before heading outside. I’ve queued this video up to the whistling sequence, [...]
July 20, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Faded Flags on the Moon
Today is the 42nd anniversary of man’s landing on the Moon. The first step on the Moon – the step that “divided history” to use the words of the time – and the planting of the American flag there seems like a lifetime ago. As a matter of fact, it was. Tomorrow, the Space Shuttle [...]
July 19, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Rutan’s Last Project: What The…?
Today I read, with some head-scratching, about Burt Rutan’s latest creation, a “roadable aircraft” called Bipod. Flying cars have been built, flown, driven, and failed to sell since dinosaurs roamed the earth, yet here was the monumentally gifted designer and his company, Scaled Composites, introducing a particularly homely vehicle (twin fuselages simply make it twice [...]
July 19, 2011
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
The Not-So-Friendly Skies
Escalating baggage fees. No more in-flight meals. Delayed flights. Loud cell-phone talkers. And let’s not forget the drunks. It may be that intoxicated passengers are the most dangerous of all. AvWeb recently reported that drunk passengers caused the crash of a Cessna 185 in 2010. (“The [Transportation Safety Board] postulates that a rear-seat passenger pushed [...]
July 14, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
Passenger Rights and the Law of Unintended Consequences
I recently had an extensive delay on a flight from New York to Las Vegas. We pushed back from the gate on time, and as I went to start the engines I could see the dark skies to the west, our intended direction of flight. As we waited on the ramp for clearance to taxi, [...]
July 14, 2011
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
The Battle of Midway, 69 Years Later
“The Battle of Midway was probably the most important battle in the Pacific war during World War II,” says Russell Lee, a curator in the aeronautics division at the National Air and Space Museum. “On that day, American carrier forces defeated the Japanese, and stopped permanently their westward expansion.” Prior to the battle, Japan possessed [...]
July 14, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
The Astronaut’s Life
“How does it feel to be part of history?” some reporter asked the STS-135 astronauts during an onboard press conference this afternoon. Well, some days probably feel more historic than others. Yesterday, for example, space station astronaut Ron Garan was on a spacewalk (above), wrestling a refrigerator-size piece of hardware into the shuttle cargo bay [...]
July 13, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
The Last to Fly
A few observations about the STS-135 shuttle astronauts, the last people to fly the 30-year-old spaceplane into orbit. By accident or design, the crew comes from a mixed military background, with one each from the Navy (commander Chris Ferguson), Marines (pilot Doug Hurley), and Air Force (mission specialist Rex Walheim). The other MS, Sandy Magnus, [...]
July 09, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
End of an Era
The space shuttle’s final liftoff. Still hard to write those words.
July 08, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Scalpers Charge Big for Shuttle Launch Tickets
One thing that’s sure to rise at Cape Canaveral over the next 24 hours—beside space shuttle Atlantis, which is due to lift off on Friday morning if the weather cooperates—is the price of a ticket to view the launch. Up to a million pairs of eyes are predicted to be on hand for the shuttle’s [...]
July 07, 2011
| By Roger Mola
The Daily Planet Blog
Send in the Drones
Today’s Washington Post has a long article about the global rise in the use of military drones. This quote struck me: “This is the direction all aviation is going,” said Kenneth Anderson, a professor of law at American University who studies the legal questions surrounding the use of drones in warfare. “Everybody will wind up [...]
July 05, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Department of “What Were They Thinking?”
Quick: What’s the strangest way to deliver mail that you can think of? By mule? On foot? By ship? By airplane? How about by missile? That’s right. More than one person thought delivering packages by rocket was an excellent idea. Our neighbor, the National Postal Museum, notes that Austria and Germany were the first countries [...]
July 01, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Congratulations Minotaur, Damn You
Wallops Island and I don’t get along. Twice in the last two years I’ve made the long drive from my home in ex-urban Washington D.C., hoping to finally see an orbital launch from this quaint and historic launch site on Virginia’s eastern shore. Twice I’ve come away empty-handed. It happened for the second time Tuesday [...]
June 30, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Pressing Your Flight Attendant’s Buttons
With a sunny and hopefully unmistakable new design for its flight attendant call button, Boeing illuminated passengers on which button to press but in the dark as to when to press it at all
June 27, 2011
| By Roger Mola
The Once and Future Moon Blog
NASA Shifts Into Neutral
By moving forward on their mission to convert the U.S. fleet of Space Shuttles into museum pieces, the administration has shifted NASA into neutral. America’s multi-billion dollar investment in the International Space Station (ISS) and our access to space is in jeopardy. As a result of the termination of the Shuttle program, we have no [...]
June 25, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Closer
The Dawn spacecraft continues to close in on Vesta, one of the last unexplored objects of appreciable size between here and Pluto. Dawn is expected to go into orbit around the asteroid on July 16. This is how Vesta looked in the navigation camera view as of June 20, when Dawn was 117,000 miles away. [...]
June 24, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Top Gun: Polar Bears Need Not Apply
How did he ever pass flight school, much less become a top gun pilot? I’m talking about the mascot from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, of course. That’s right, the insane polar bear that hijacks an F-16 and rockets into space before each of the team’s hockey games (video below). Consider the facts: An [...]
June 23, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
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In the Magazine
