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 31 of 51
The Daily Planet Blog
Plymouth Rock: 90 Days in a Minivan
At first I was excited to read press reports of a Lockheed-Martin concept for a bare-bones human asteroid mission, using a pair of Orion capsules yoked together. Finally, a near-term plan! Because the Orion is mostly built, the first "Plymouth Rock" mission could fly as early as 2016, nine years ea...
September 03, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Pégoud Flies Upside Down, 1913
French aviator Adolphe Pégoud ranks as one of the best and bravest pilots in history, and he knew how to wow a crowd. On this day in 1913 he introduced a trick that scared even other pioneers of flight—he flew upside down, for an audience at the Juvisy aerodrome outside Paris.A correspondent descri...
September 01, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Aliens Confirmed Dead
In researching a reader's letter about "Department of Flying Saucers" in the Sept. 2010 issue, I came across a report on the Web site, UFO Casebook, which claimed that General Omar Bradley had been flown overseas to view alien beings retrieved from a UFO crash site in the Arctic Circle. The report ...
August 31, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
Stand up, sit down, fall off
It's not new material, but if you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to take a couple minutes to watch. Austrian skydiver Paul Steiner did some ambitious wing walking earlier this year in this Red Bull video, with a pair of Blanix gliders flown by Ewald Roithner and Kurt Tippi high above the...
August 30, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
A.W.O.L.
You may have read about the X-37B, the U.S. Air Force's new unmanned orbital spaceplane, in our January issue. The secretive satellite with space-shuttlesque delta wings made its first launch on April 22 of this year atop an Atlas V rocket, and has been in orbit since, visible on the web via a numb...
August 26, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Once and Future Moon Blog
The Moon: Creating Capability in Space and Getting Value for our Money
Of all the possible destinations in space, the Moon offers the proximity, accessibility, and materials necessary to learn how to use what we find in space to create new capabilities. Harvesting the resources of the Moon will allow us to make what we need in space, rather than carrying it with us f...
August 24, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Stripped-Down Spaceflight in Denmark
However the Copenhagen Suborbitals project turns out, you have to give these people points for nerve. The eventual plan is to launch a human to an altitude of 100 kilometers inside a capsule barely large enough to fit one person, standing up. For the moment, the Danish team would be happy just to l...
August 24, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Gossamer Condor: The First Human-Powered Flight
It took 18 years for someone to claim the $100,000 prize offered by British industrialist Henry Kremer for the first sustained (mile-long) human-powered flight. On this day in 1977, the Gossamer Condor, built by Paul MacCready and flown by bicyclist/ hang-glider pilot Bryan Allen, won the challenge...
August 23, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Wings of Honor
The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., was built to honor the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during that conflict, the more than 400,000 who died, and all who supported their efforts from the homefront. But the Greatest Generation is aging rapidly, and about 1,200 World...
August 20, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Once and Future Moon Blog
The Incredible Shrinking Moon
Back in the 1970’s Paleolithic age of lunar studies, scientists were busy using images of the Moon in an attempt to understand lunar processes and history. In the rugged ancient cratered uplands of the Moon, they saw something curious. Many small scarps dotted the highlands and were visible in o...
August 19, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Remembering Belka and Strelka
By some definitions, you could say that spaceflight began 50 years ago today.On August 19, 1960, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 5 capsule containing 40 mice, two rats, a rabbit, some fruit flies, plants—and a pair of dogs, Belka ("Whitey") and Strelka ("Little Arrow.") They were the first li...
August 19, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
B-24 Understudy Fills Big Shoes
Just two weeks ago, the Commemorative Air Force returned its B-29 Superfortress, Fifi, to flight after six years of down time while the airplane was fitted with customized engines (maintainers had found metal shavings in the engine oil). The CAF planned to re-launch Fifi as the signature aircraft f...
August 18, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
Astronomy's To Do List
Every ten years or so, the nation's astronomers put their heads (actually committees) together to come up with a collective wish list for the projects they'd like to see funded over the next decade. Politicians tend to like this method of setting scientific priorities, as it saves them from choosin...
August 13, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
He May Be a Smart Physicist, But...
Here's Stephen Hawking, commenting on humanity’s future:
...Our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only c...
August 11, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Zephyr Goes for the Record
With UAVs becoming more capable and taking on more missions each day, military users are clamoring for one feature in particular: longer dwell time in the air.DARPA's Vulture program aims to build an unmanned vehicle that could stay up for five years. That's still quite a stretch, considering that ...
August 10, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Nobody knows ….. how dry I am
The never-ending saga of water on the Moon continues apace. In the latest revelation, it is now claimed that the Moon is indeed “dry” after all and never had much water (this new finding is only in regard to endogenous lunar water contained inside the Moon, not to water that has been or is being ...
August 07, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Dog Ate My Homework
The cabaret known as the U.S. Air Force's KC-X tanker competition is getting in some high-kicks now, baby. This summer, a little known company with 30 employees called U.S. Aerospace, which had changed its name from New Century only last March, and which has had some recent questions surrounding it...
August 06, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Low Jinks in the Mach Loop
How do you complete a marathon in four minutes? In a jet fighter, of course, at 400-plus knots. That's how this Tornado pilot and others fly the Mach Loop in Wales. The loop is a 26-mile ring of valleys in a region designated by the British military as Low Flying Area 7, one of several such regi...
August 03, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
The Air Force in 2030
Forecasting technology is a notoriously tricky business. In spite of all the predictions, we still don't have fusion power or flying cars, but in 2010 you can kick around a virtual soccer ball using a handheld camera phone, and who saw that coming?It's the job of the Air Force Chief Scientist and h...
July 30, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
NASA's Next Mars Rover
The Curiosity rover, scheduled for launch to Mars next year, took its first test drive last week.
July 30, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
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