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 36 of 51
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Value for Cost: The Determinate Path
The report of the Augustine committee analyzes America’s space program through a very narrow prism. Much of their report argues that the existing program of record (more specifically, the Ares I and V launch system) is not affordable, a fact already apparent to most observers. Thus, the committee...
March 24, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
F-35 Sticks the (Vertical) Landing
Lockheed Martin's F-35B Lightning II fighter hit another mark in its test program on March 18: the first vertical landing. Pilot Graham Tomlinson gently descended from a height of 150 feet after hovering for a minute above the runway at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. Watch for yourse...
March 23, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Wanna Be a Tuskegee Airman?
Or at least play one? Then keep an eye on the casting calls for George Lucas's next film, Red Tails, currently shooting in San Francisco.From a recent announcement:
Beau Bonneau Casting in San Francisco is currently working on a George Lucas Film "Red Tails" starring Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrance...
March 22, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Robert M. White, 1924 - 2010
Former World War II POW, Korean War veteran, and Air Force test pilot Bob White died on March 17, St. Patrick's Day. "The old Irishman went home at 11:55 last night," his son, Greg, wrote in an e-mail to relatives and friends this morning. Major General White retired from the Air Force in 1981 wit...
March 18, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
The First Spacewalk, 1965
Forty-five years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk during his Voskhod 2 orbital flight.Leonov recalled in his 2004 book with Dave Scott, Two Sides of the Moon:
When my four-year-old daughter, Vika, saw me take my first steps in space, I later learned, she hid her f...
March 18, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
So That's Where We Parked Them!
Scientists studying photos from the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have identified the relic Soviet Lunokhod rovers that touched down on the moon in the 1970s. Read the report here.Planetary scientists at the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow have also been playing with the LRO images. Be sure to cl...
March 18, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Helicopter Drop Tests
Crashing test dummies into walls must not be enough fun for some people, so the engineers at NASA's Langley Research Center have upped the ante. These stoic mannequins were strapped inside an MD-500 helicopter last week and dropped from a height of 35 feet to test whether a honeycomb cushion shock ...
March 17, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Norm!
Okay, I date myself to the 80s with that one. But those of us born prior to the last two decades will remember the verbal welcome that Norm Peterson received each time he entered the bar, Cheers, on the TV show of the same name.Well, Norm Augustine gets almost that welcome wherever he shows up. On ...
March 16, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
HST + 3D + IMAX = Wow
Think the photo's impressive? Wait 'til you see the trailer for Hubble 3D, opening Friday in IMAX theaters.
March 15, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Stuck in Transit – Unchaining Ourselves From the Rocket Equation
Last fall, after much anticipation, the Augustine Committee presented us with their assessment of the future of space exploration. Its basic conclusion was that at currently envisioned budgets, the Program of Record (a.k.a. ESAS, Project Constellation) would not get us back to the Moon before many...
March 11, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
"Sorry, Goose, It's Time to Buzz the Tower"
The 31 members of Class 136, U.S. Navy Test Pilot School at Patuxent River, Maryland, which graduated last December, pitched in on a deluxe jet plane kiddie ride, wearing Test Pilot School livery and signed by each student. Says Damon Carson of Kiddie Rides USA, "The commanding officer and other st...
March 11, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
More Animals Aloft
You’re wandering through the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center when you notice the parachute. An extremely small parachute. This thing couldn’t keep Anne Morrow Lindbergh aloft. So who was it for? Turns out it was made for a lion cub named Gilmore, the pet of air racer and...
March 09, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Help for the Orbiting Astronaut
This is the kind of thing that shows just how weirdly connected we've all become.The other day Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi was up on the space station, downloading pictures via Twitter that he'd taken out the window. He asked if anybody could identify a weird hexagonal shape in Australia....
March 08, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Space Toys
Space toys can be big business. In 2007, a toy Robby the Robot inspired by the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet was given a retail estimate of $4,500. But that's chump change compared to what Masudaya's Target Robot (right) went for at a recent auction at Dan Morphy—a whopping $52,900.True, the 15-in...
March 05, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
The Daily Planet Blog
Apollo Legends, On the Road Again
When Bob Hope took Neil Armstrong to Southeast Asia with the USO Tour a few months after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the troops at each show gave the astronaut and former Navy fighter pilot standing ovations whenever he walked on stage.Armstrong will travel abroad again to bolster troop moral, this...
March 03, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Phobos Up Close
Given all the angst recently about NASA astronauts needing a new destination, it's good to step back and review the options. There aren't many. There's the moon, of course, and Mars. A near-Earth asteroid. And one more possibility, often forgotten—the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos.Tomorrow at 3:5...
March 02, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Ice at the north pole of the Moon
Last year, India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter spent eight months mapping the surface of the Moon. I had the honor of being the Principal Investigator of an experiment on that mission, the Mini-SAR imaging radar. The purpose of this experiment is to map and characterize the deposits within perman...
March 01, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Talismanic Thinking
Wild claims are being tossed about regarding the future U.S. space program. Recipes for success are touted and e-mailed around – concepts based more on wishful thinking than on solid science and engineering. My friend Rand Simberg refers to those who would replicate anew the means we devised to g...
February 27, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
The First Supersonic Bail-Out
How does it feel to eject from an aircraft going nearly 800 miles per hour?Terrible.But test pilot George Smith managed to survive his harrowing ordeal on this day in 1955, after bailing out of an F-100A diving at Mach 1.05 toward the ocean. As recounted in TIME magazine months later, the 40-g dece...
February 26, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Race and the Space Race
PRX Radio ran an interesting piece over the weekend, narrated by former astronaut Mae Jemison, about race and the early space program. NASA and the civil rights movement came of age in the same decade, and by chance, the agency's main centers were in places like Texas, Alabama, and Florida—the hear...
February 25, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
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