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 22 of 51
The Daily Planet Blog
Wrapping Up a Mars Rover
How do you pack a $2.5 billion Mars rover for shipment? Here’s how. This time-lapse video, covering a period of five days, shows the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory being prepared for shipment from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to its launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The journey, scheduled for later this month, will be partly [...]
June 22, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Midwinter
“Now is the winter of our discontent” – Richard III, Act 1, scene 1 There is a good piece in today’s Telegraph UK by David Robson of a fateful one-hundredth anniversary – the Midwinter Dinner — June 22, 1911 held in Robert Falcon Scott’s Ross Island hut. A year earlier, Scott and the crew of [...]
June 21, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
A Fleet’s Last Lesson
Gene Breiner got a little choked up when he handed over his 1929 Fleet Model 2 to the National Air and Space Museum at “Become a Pilot” Day on Saturday. He dedicated it to “all the people who learned to fly in her, and all the people I took for their first and last airplane [...]
June 20, 2011
| By Linda Shiner
The Daily Planet Blog
The Akron and Macon’s Hail Mary Pass
“One of the interesting things about airships,” says Tom Crouch, a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum, who gave a lecture on the subject this week as part of the Museum’s Ask an Expert series, is that they were “transitional technology. They were capable of doing a great many things before airplanes [...]
June 17, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Air Travel 2050: Panoramic Views With a Wave of the Hand
Airbus calls its Concept Plane for 2050 an aircraft “inspired by nature.” But it sure includes a lot of technology. “The idea is to move out from the old-fashioned class system—first class, business class, economy class—and think more about the experience,” says Airbus chief engineer Charles Champion in an interview with The (London) Telegraph. “So [...]
June 15, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Mile-High Jetpack
If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at this video of the Martin Aircraft Company’s recent mile-high test of its personal jetpack and safety parachute system. The flight topped out at 5,000 feet, but could have gone higher. While a dummy was on board for this test, the New Zealand-based company is marketing [...]
June 13, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Mr. Moonbase
We don’t generally give shout-outs to fellow bloggers, but in this case it’s deserved: Paul Spudis, who writes the “Once and Future Moon” blog on this site, recently won the National Space Society’s Space Pioneer Award for finding what may be a way out of the doldrums that currently afflict U.S. space policy. That isn’t [...]
June 10, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Rosetta: Target Ho!
The last time we looked in on the European comet-chaser Rosetta, the spacecraft was still years away from its destination. Well, it’s still years away—three to be precise. And it just went into hibernation. But before going to sleep, Rosetta took this first, very long-distance picture of its target: comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Not much to look [...]
June 08, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Shuttle and ISS, Together Again for the First Time
Maybe the most amazing thing about this photo is that it took 12 years of docked operations before someone got a picture of the space shuttle attached to the International Space Station. But here it is. Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured this view on May 23 from the departing Soyuz spacecraft. Click on the photo [...]
June 07, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Miracle on I-95
The US Airways Airbus A320 that figured in the January 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson” is headed (via highway) from New Jersey to its new home at the Carolinas Aviation Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina. The route will take it through Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and North Carolina. Follow the airplane’s progress on Facebook or [...]
June 06, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Bon Voyage, Soyuz TMA-02M
Not a day goes by without some TV news reporter asking an astronaut or NASA official, “How do you feel now that Americans will have to rely on the Russians to get to orbit?” Folks, we’ve been doing that for 16 years. Tomorrow the Soyuz TMA-02M is scheduled to blast off from Kazakhstan, bound for [...]
June 06, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
From “One Small Step” to Settlement
At the recent International Space Development Conference in Huntsville, Augustine committee member and CEO of XCOR Aerospace Jeff Greason gave a talk on the goals of human spaceflight. While he discussed many things that I agree with (in particular, making the use of off-planet resources a high priority), one idea in particular stood out. Greason [...]
June 03, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Something Rocketing in the State of Denmark
We’re still not sure whether to take the folks at Copenhagen Suborbitals seriously in their quest (eventually) to launch people into space. But they plan to test-launch their HEAT-1X rocket from the Baltic Sea tomorrow. The last attempt, in September, was ruined by a liquid oxygen valve failure. Now they’ve regrouped for another try, with [...]
June 02, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Holy Flaming APUs!
This video of Endeavour‘s picture-perfect landing at 2:35 a.m. today offers a little surprise, even for some veteran shuttle watchers. Can you guess what we’re referring to? If you guessed the flickering light at the base of the vertical tail, you’re spot on. And if you stuck with the video to the 1:20 mark, the [...]
June 01, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Helicopter Missions: Vietnam Firefight
In 1966, Second Lieutenant Larry Liss was on the Czech-German border during a snowstorm, freezing his varlata off, when he saw something beautiful. It was a Bell UH-1 helicopter, still on the ground. The pilot—who was wearing short sleeves and drinking a cup of coffee—took one look at Liss and shook his head. “He said, [...]
May 31, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
The Winds of Dublin
Like a lot of airline pilots, I’m always on the lookout for a good trip to pick up, either to add to my schedule or trade for a less desirable trip. “Open time” is what we call the list of trips with no current pilot assignment. The list is dynamic, and trips pop up throughout [...]
May 27, 2011
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
Your Gate: F4
With the tragedy in Joplin, Missouri this week, tornadoes have been front and center in the news. At the time of this post, the death toll in and around Joplin, according to the Associated Press, has risen to 132 while the list of people still missing hovers at 156. At the number seven slot, 2011 [...]
May 27, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
NASA Art Returns to Washington
Since 1963, hundreds of artists (and musicians, poets—even one fashion designer) have interpreted NASA’s aeronautic and space projects. The artists were given carte blanche to create what they wanted, in any medium, on any subject. In celebration of NASA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, more than 70 diverse artworks from the program began touring the country [...]
May 27, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Water Bears and Star(c)hips
A few random thoughts on Day 11 of Endeavour‘s last flight: Tomorrow STS-134 astronaut Mike Fincke will become the U.S. record holder for time spent in space, eclipsing chief astronaut Peggy Whitson’s 377-day mark. Not bad for a guy who once washed out of Air Force fighter pilot training. “My arms weren’t golden enough to [...]
May 26, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
So Long, Spirit
Last night NASA made one last attempt to contact the Spirit Mars rover, which got stuck in the sand two years ago and hadn’t been heard from since March 22. Nobody expected a response after 1200 previous unanswered messages, and sure enough, there was no answer from Mars. So, with the chances of success “practically [...]
May 25, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
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