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 23 of 51
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
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Presidential Pronouncements on Space: Some 50th Anniversary Thoughts
Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s special address to Congress – a request for supplemental appropriation for a variety of projects but most famously remembered for the announcement of his Man-Moon-Decade goal of Project Apollo. That event, cited by space advocates and excerpted in space and history documentaries, is remembered as [...]
May 24, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Survival Tactics
During World War II, the Smithsonian Institution aided the war effort in many different ways. An “Ethnogeographic Board” was established to act as a clearinghouse for government wartime needs, and one of their major undertakings was the “Survival Project,” requested by the U.S. Navy. Smithsonian historian Pamela Henson writes in “The Smithsonian Goes to War: [...]
May 24, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Shuttle Notes: A Papal Visit, and a Photo-Op
In this time of endings for the space shuttle, there are still a few firsts left. On Saturday morning, Pope Benedict XVI made the first ever papal “visit” (via video link) to astronauts in orbit. In many ways it was an extraordinary conversation, ranging from the future of space exploration to condolences (to Paolo Nespoli [...]
May 23, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Life on the Big Screen
The “glass cockpit,” named for the new generation of flat panel, liquid crystal displays (LCDs), is commonplace now in all types of aircraft from the Cessna to the space shuttle. LCD technology began to appear in earnest in the 1990s. Today, with the continued price plunge of electronic displays, the perforated instrument panel, like that [...]
May 20, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Scenes From the Shuttle: Greetings!
With just one space shuttle flight left to go, every milestone on the current STS-134 mission is poignant for the astronauts and other folks who work on the program, and for those of us who’ve been watching them for a long time. Here’s a scene we’ll see only once more: A shuttle full of astronauts [...]
May 19, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Explanation: They Were Drunk
In the history of aviation, there were ideas that didn’t quite work out. Take the Avro VZ-9-AV Avrocar, one of ten odd aircraft profiled in the Smithsonian Channel film “Unbelievable Flying Objects.” (It’s number 5). The U.S. Air Force became interested in the Avrocar as an early “stealth” aircraft that could hover beneath radar, then [...]
May 17, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Senior Aviatrix
She thought she'd like to fly again. And so she flew. Helene Dax, 87, a former pilot, had filled out a survey form at the Brookdale Senior Living center where she lives in Denver. Brookdale, which caters to people challenged with Alzheimer's and dementia, and Jeremy Bloom's Wish of a Lifetime found...
May 16, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Young Visitors Inspire Old Scientist
A perennial hand-wringing topic among policy geeks is America’s decline in math and science proficiency. This sentiment has been expressed the entire 30 years I’ve worked on space science and exploration – new generations don’t care about space, can’t do math and science, can’t think properly and ...
May 14, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
The Turtle Flies!
Gamera, you'll recall from Japanese horror movies, was a giant, fire-breathing, flying turtle that used to terrorize Tokyo (and battle Godzilla) back in the 1960s.So what else would students at the University of Maryland—whose mascot is a terrapin—name their flying contraption, which yesterday appe...
May 13, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Crossing the Atlantic by Balloon (and Other Means)
When Jules Verne's novel Five Weeks in a Balloon: or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen was translated into English in 1869, it appeared with this publisher's note: "So far as the geography, the inhabitants, the animals, and the features of the countries the travellers pass ove...
May 12, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
A Historic Crash and its Legacy
It was about the hardest landing you can have and survive. Forty-four years ago today, NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson unwittingly created the intro for 1970s television show “The Six Million Dollar Man” when he hit the lakebed in an M2-F2 lifting body aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base doing 250 miles an hour without [...]
May 10, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Enter the Firebird
Northrop Grumman has entered a new vehicle in the red-hot field of military reconnaissance with its Firebird UAV, built by Scaled Composites. And this one can fly with or without a pilot.According to the company's press release, the Firebird is a versatile spy plane: it can return high-definition v...
May 10, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Helo With a Halo
Plenty of buzz going around about the mysterious stealth chopper left behind by U.S. Navy SEALs after they shot and killed Osama bin Laden last Monday morning, local time, in Pakistan.Having suffered technical problems and a hard landing, the helo apparently couldn't fly back out of bin Laden's com...
May 06, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Thunderbirds Are Go!
Who can forget billionaire ex-spaceman Jeff Tracy and his five sons (Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon, and John), each named after a Mercury astronaut? Remember how they—through their organization (International Rescue)—um...rescued people...internationally? Ok, so they were puppets. Deal with it, peop...
May 05, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Who's short-sighted?
Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan recently voiced his doubts and concerns over the future of the human spaceflight program, while former Lockheed-Martin CEO Norman Augustine reflected on the current state of our space “vision” and/or the possible lack thereof. I found these perspectives by two gia...
May 04, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
So You Want to Live on Mars? Really?
Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan thinks the notion of a one-way trip to Mars is "a ridiculous concept...That's not the kind of people we are." And he's hardly alone in that view.Every time the subject of one-way Mars expeditions comes up, it reminds me, in a perverse way, of Ambrose Bierce's great Civi...
May 04, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
About Those Sleeping Air Traffic Controllers
Air traffic controllers have been in the news several times in the past month. First came the "asleep in the tower" stories at Washington National Airport and Reno, Nevada. Then the First Lady's airplane had to go around at Andrews AFB because it was too close to other traffic. The 24-hour news mon...
May 02, 2011
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
VASIMR: Still Hot
Late in 2014, a radically different type of rocket propulsion is set to show up on the International Space station for a period of experimentation.The technology is called the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). It's a rocket engine that uses electricity to ionize a gas such as...
May 02, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
It's Fun to be Rich
On May 5, 2011, Bonhams auction house will hold its annual space history sale. (The date commemorates the 50th anniversary of Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard's suborbital flight in Freedom 7.) Some 250 items are up for grabs, a few coming from the Forbes Collection, others from the personal collect...
April 28, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
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