Editors' Picks
Printed in Space
If your star tracker breaks on the way to the moon, just hit Command P.
Area 51: Origins
America’s once-secret air base had humble beginnings.
Need for Speed
Airplanes with a mission: Fly faster.
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.
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The Daily Planet Blog
The Victory of Advertising
Before the Japanese air attack on the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, less than one percent of all workers in American aeronautical factories were female. Just two years later, more than 475,000 women would help to manufacture aircraft for the war effort. Another 350,000 would ...
April 08, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Found: Air France Flight 447
You've heard of the UAV (unmanned air vehicle). Now check out the AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle): The REMUS 6000. It looks like a yellow torpedo. It's a lot smarter. And it dives a lot deeper.Yesterday, the tenacious underwater 'bot located at long last the remains of Air France flight 447, w...
April 05, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
A Handshake (and a Movie) Before You Go
The Soyuz TMA-21 crew is scheduled to blast off for the International Space Station this evening, with NASA astronaut Ron Garan and two rookie cosmonauts, Aleksandr Samokutyayev and Andrei Borisenko, onboard, ready to begin the Expedition 27 mission.Because their trip comes close to the 50th annive...
April 04, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Parachuting in Virtual Reality
That's what they're doing at the Royal Air Force's Brize Norton base as an adjunct to regular jump training.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr81ZG-tXQU
April 01, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
You Can’t Always Get What You Want (but if you try some time, you might find … you get what you need)
A plan for a human mission to a near Earth object (NEO; an asteroid), designed by engineers from Georgia Tech and the National Institute for Aerospace (GT/NIA), was recently posted online. Keying in on lowering program total costs, this architecture eliminates the need for a new heavy lift launch ...
March 31, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
The Night I Owned Dulles
Washington Dulles International Airport opened in 1962 and serves over a million passengers per month today. But it wasn't always that way. For the first couple of decades of its existence, Dulles was a virtual ghost town when compared to other major airports in the country.I clearly remember the t...
March 31, 2011
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
Robo-Gull
Wow. Aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal would have loved this. German automation company Festo has built a "SmartBird" modeled on the herring gull that, according to the company, can take off, fly, and land autonomously—just by flapping its wings.The design features a number of innovations, including...
March 28, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Gimme the Good Old Days
With ever-mounting budget cuts, and pressure to reduce the national deficit, NASA and the FAA just don’t crash airplanes intentionally like they used to. Here’s a golden oldie of a test the two agencies jointly conducted on December 1, 1984, when they took a Boeing 720 (a smaller, faster version of...
March 23, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Once and Future Moon Blog
The Moon’s Role in Climate Science
A recent article about the role of global magnetic fields in the loss of planetary volatiles caught my attention. The article addresses planetary climate issues as they relate to Earth, Mars and Venus, but what struck me was this statement:
We don't have a direct record of the sun's history, but a...
March 22, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Zoom Zoom
When we last left the Garvey Space Craft/Cal State Long Beach rocketeers at the Friends of Amateur Rocketry test site in Mojave, California, they had static-tested their P-18 engine, designed to launch nanosatellites to low Earth orbit, for the 150 seconds required to launch an orbital first stage....
March 21, 2011
| By Pat Trenner
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Volcanic Shields of the Moon
Come home with your shield, or on it – Spartan women to their husbands, marching off to war.From the giant Olympus Mons shield on Mars (600 kilometers across and 27 km high) to the large volcanoes of Venus, shield-building was thought to be a common expression of volcanism on all rocky Solar Syste...
March 19, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
The Human Touch
One thing I've always liked about the Russian space program is that it keeps the "human" in human spaceflight. NASA often seems more interested in technology than people. You can see it in the different feel of the international space station modules: the American, European and Japanese labs are f...
March 18, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Taxi or Rental Car?
That's one interesting question that a few former space shuttle astronauts and other experts were grappling with one day in early March at the National Research Council's Keck building in downtown Washington, D.C. Around a large conference table sat NASA veterans Fred Gregory, history's first black...
March 15, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The View from 30,000 Feet Blog
Time for a Check-Up
I'm just back from recurrent training — two days of fun and games in the simulator. It's kind of like a trip to the dentist: not something you look forward to, but it feels pretty good when it's over. And it's definitely worthwhile.Each day we showed up at 5 a.m. for the briefing, then went into th...
March 11, 2011
| By Steve Satre
The Daily Planet Blog
One of the "Intrepid Birdwomen"
"Here is a group of feminine flyers who don't just fool around with flying," reported the Los Angeles Times in January 1934. "They hardly ever powder their noses. They don't even carry mirrors. They'd rather poke their not unhandsome little noses into a balky carburetor than riffle up a pack of bri...
March 11, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Formation Flight
A government-industry team is getting closer to demonstrating that unmanned vehicles can be refueled at high altitudes by other UAVs. In a January 21 test, Northrop Grumman's piloted Proteus aircraft flew as close as 40 feet to an unmanned NASA Global Hawk, also produced by Northrop Grumman, while...
March 09, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Discovery's Last... and First...Flight
With space shuttle Discovery having just wrapped up its career, we thought you might like this account of its first flight back in 1984, as narrated by the STS-41D crew.See here for more of these shuttle home videos.
March 09, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Lunney’s Legacy
These are emotional days for the folks who work on the space shuttle, as they watch vehicles and people retire. Today was the last day on the job for Bryan Lunney, a 22-year veteran NASA flight director who also happens to be the son of legendary flight director Glynn Lunney.Here's how Bryan summed...
March 07, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Spacewalker in a Telescope
Amazing what you can see in a 10-inch telescope if the conditions are right. Dutch amateur astronomer Ralf Vandebergh got a picture of STS-133 astronaut Steve Bowen spacewalking outside the International Space Station last week.
March 07, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Bad Day at Vandenberg
Ron Grabe, launch system manager for Orbital Sciences, didn't try to sugar-coat the news. "Tonight we're all pretty devastated," he said during a predawn press briefing at Vandenberg AFB today.Orbital's Taurus XL rocket had just dumped NASA's $424 million Glory climate satellite into the Pacific oc...
March 04, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
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Air & Space Videos
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Big Green MarbleA year's worth of vegetation change on Earth, as seen by the Suomi NPP satellite. |
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A Mosquito in FlightRestored from the hull up, a de Havilland Mosquito flies over New Zealand's Hauraki Gulf. |
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Need to Know
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Air & Space Interview
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Bobby BraunNASA's outgoing Chief Technologist talks about what's in the R&D pipeline |
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