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 34 of 51
The Once and Future Moon Blog
It’s the Space Economy, Stupid!
Those of us in favor of human lunar return have been called “dinosaurs” because, as it’s being told, we want to repeat what this nation already did 40 years ago. If that were our mission objective, such a characterization might be valid. But who really is the dinosaur?At a recent Senate hearing, ...
May 21, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
"Do these long wings make me look fat?"
At an "Ask An Expert" lecture by John Anderson, National Air and Space Museum curator of aeronautics, I learned that although Howard Hughes' H-1 racer is displayed wearing its cross-country "long" wings, the high-speed-dash wings, which are shorter, are in storage at the Museum's Garber facility in...
May 19, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
Better Than Hubble—From the Ground
In the age of orbiting telescopes such as the Hubble and the not-yet-launched James Webb Space Telescope, it's worth giving a nod to the dramatic advances made in building ground-based telescopes.The board of trustees of the Carnegie Institution for Science just authorized the release of $59.2 mill...
May 18, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Using the Earth to study the Moon
Last week, the Science Team of the Mini-RF imaging radar experiment aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission, met in Flagstaff, Arizona. We were there to conduct field studies of some interesting lunar analogs that occur in this area. Scientists study the planets through a variety of ...
May 15, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Japan Sets Sail for Venus
While the U.S. space program is mired in political arguments over how to reach Earth orbit (something we've known how to do for 50 years), Japan's space agency JAXA, with far less money, is about to take a small but noteworthy step into the future.An HII-A launcher is scheduled to lift off from the...
May 14, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
A New Arm for the Space Station
As the space station gets its finishing touches (Atlantis carries up a new Russian storage module on tomorrow's STS-132 mission), we'll see some new gadgets come into play. One is the European Robotic Arm, due to be installed on the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module in 2012. A spare elbow for ...
May 13, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Pad Abort Test: The Videos
NASA has released better video of the recent launch abort system test in New Mexico. Some spectacular views here.
May 12, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Voyager 2 Skips a Beat
Flight directors at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are troubleshooting a glitch with the distant Voyager 2 spacecraft, which is still sending back signals from the outer solar system 33 years after it was launched. According to a JPL release, ground controllers haven't received inte...
May 10, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Breaking the Sound Barrier: Yer Doin' It Wrong
Attention, turbojet-heads: Turner Classic Movies airs "The Sound Barrier" at 8 p.m. EST Friday, May 7. The 1952 film, directed by David Lean, plays fast and loose with aerodynamics and aviation history, but it offers fine footage of a de Havilland Comet and a Supermarine Swift interceptor, a number...
May 07, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
Behold Excalibur
Among the more intriguing commercial space vehicles on the drawing board is Excalibur Almaz, whose backers propose to use leftover vehicles built for a Soviet military space station program that died aborning in the 1970s. The principals in the company include Art Dula, an old hand in the field of ...
May 06, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
The Aerodynamic Properties of the Humvee
What springs to mind when thinking of the Humvee? Its sleek, aerodynamic lines? Well, no. But that didn't stop DARPA from announcing (in a 58-page proposal) its plans for combining an SUV-type ground vehicle with Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) capabilities. In other words, a flying Humvee.DAR...
May 04, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Robonaut Gets His Mission
So we thought the last of NASA's rookie astronauts had flown, leaving only veterans on the final few space shuttle flights.Not so fast.One last rookie will be on board space shuttle Discovery when it blasts off in September for the STS-133 mission.After years languishing as a laboratory-only projec...
May 03, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
The Four Flavors of Lunar Water
The Moon is constantly bombarded by the solid debris of the Solar System. Comets, asteroids and interplanetary dust, all containing varying amounts of water, have pounded the lunar surface for billions of years. Yet until recently, the Moon was considered to be barren and bone-dry. Rock and soil...
May 02, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Super Fly: Celebrities and Airplanes
Kitty Kelley's recent tell-all biography of Oprah Winfrey revealed that the talk-show diva owns a $47 million Bombardier BD-700 Global Express high-speed jet. According to biographer Kelley, when Winfrey upgraded from a $40 million Gulfstream in 2006, she also spent $1 million refurbishing her hang...
April 30, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Browsing the Webb
The James Webb Space Telescope just cleared its most significant milestone, the Mission Critical Design Review. This means that the orbiting infrared observatory, scheduled to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket no earlier than June 2014 into orbit around the sun, about a million miles from Earth, is expe...
April 29, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Give This Steco a Home
Dennis Eggert, president of the Minnesota Air & Space Museum, is in desperate need of storage space for a 1911 Steco Aerohydroplane. “God forbid if it comes to calling a trash truck or Dumpster,” he says, “but it’s got to be moved.” The aircraft had been disassembled and stored in various site...
April 28, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
Back to Normal
After being shut down due to worries about volcanic ash choking jet engines, air traffic resumed over Europe last week, as seen in this visualization produced by the folks at ITO World.
April 28, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Power of the Pen
Still picking yourself up off the floor after reading our recent post about the $152,000 that was paid at auction for Neil Armstrong's autograph, along with his famous "one small step" quote, written on a sheet of the Apollo 11 flight plan?Here's what Armstrong had to say in his 2005 biography by J...
April 26, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Manhigh Pioneer David Simons, 1922-2010
Six weeks before Sputnik 1 ushered in the Space Age, and four years before Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 flight, an adventurous young biomedical researcher named David Simons climbed to the edge of space inside a pressurized capsule, as part of a project called Manhigh. As we wrote in an article publishe...
April 23, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
The Sun in Hi-Def
New hi-definition movies of the Sun, from NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory. Mesmerizing.
April 23, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
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Air & Space Videos
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Air & Space Interview
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