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 37 of 51
The Once and Future Moon Blog
A Lunar Visionary
My good friend Klaus Heiss is resting in the hospital after recently suffering a stoke. Klaus is not widely known or familiar to many in the space community, but over the years, he has had a major impact on our national space program – a major player in both the Shuttle program and in helping to p...
February 23, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
More Detail From NASA
Those who say NASA is giving up on human space exploration may want to take a look at the details the agency just released about where its budgeted money is going over the next several years. The table on page EXP-3 of this document shows more than $15 billion over the next five years allocated for...
February 23, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
Falcon 9 on the Launch Pad
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket—which the company hopes will usher in a new era of lower-cost commercial space travel—has arrived at its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.Engineers are checking out the vehicle's fuel, liquid oxygen, and gas pressure systems. Once they pass muster, the launch team will...
February 22, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
The Capt. Marlon Green
When Marlon Green wanted a flying job with Continental Airlines more than 50 years ago, the company wouldn't give him the time of day. Now they've named an airplane after him.Green, who died last year at the age of 80, had to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court to get hired as the first Afric...
February 19, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Bill Gordon, Father of the Arecibo Observatory
William Gordon, the Cornell University engineer who dreamed up the world's largest dish antenna, died this week at the age of 92. His recollections of the Arecibo Telescope's early days were included in a story that ran in our October 1997 issue, not long after the observatory was upgraded with new...
February 19, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
The Astronaut Olympics
The other night, while most Americans were sleeping, the astronauts on the International Space Station decided to have a little fun. The Winter Olympics were on, the crew had a few hours of free time, and here's what they came up with:A couple things strike me about this scene, and the rest of the ...
February 17, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Confusing the Means and the Ends
The release of the proposed NASA budget and new “direction” has led to an intense “cage fight” in the blogosphere over who has the best rocket and the best architecture. Many “New Space” advocates are ecstatic, viewing the cancellation of the Constellation program as vindication of their view that...
February 13, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
A Diving Rate
The United States Parachute Association has released the good news that 2009 marked the lowest skydiving fatality rate for one year in almost half a century: 16 deaths in nearly three million jumps by over 32,000 USPA members at 220 drop zones across the U.S. Of those three million, 400,000 were by...
February 12, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Daily Planet Blog
And Now, Starring the Sun
Quick, what's the most photogenic object in our solar system? Earth? Yeah, pretty. Saturn? Lovely rings. But for sheer drama and majesty, it's hard to beat pictures of the sun taken from spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO.Those satellites are about to be eclipsed (sorry) by the Solar Dynamics Observat...
February 11, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
The Price of Human Spaceflight
So NASA’s Constellation program is dead. No more Ares rockets, no government-funded Orion capsule.With all due respect to the engineers who worked on the program, we’re better off without it.After six years and $9 billion spent, Constellation only managed a single suborbital test launch—of mostly m...
February 04, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Are they lying...flat?
Last week, Air New Zealand announced in breathless language that they had finally solved the problem of sleeping in economy class. "Air New Zealand will transform international air travel later this year when it introduces revolutionary, Kiwi-designed lie-flat economy" seats, read a company press r...
February 03, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Vision Impaired
The release of the new proposed budget for NASA has unleashed a blizzard of news articles and commentary. The administration proposes to terminate Constellation, the agency effort to design and build a new space transportation system to carry people to low Earth orbit and beyond. In its place, th...
February 03, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
When Asteroids Collide
Is that what's going on in this Hubble Space Telescope image?
February 02, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Live from the Space Station
As reality TV, let's just say it lacks drama. So far I haven't seen a single shouting match. But beginning today, you can watch live as NASA astronauts go about their daily business inside the International Space Station.The "Live From the ISS" link on NASA's space station web page shows you the vi...
February 01, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Russian Raptor
Russia's first "fifth-generation" fighter made its debut today on a snowy airfield in the country's far east.Sukhoi test pilot Sergey Bogdan took the company's PAK FA prototype aircraft on a 47-minute flight before returning to the factory runway at Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Bogdan reported that the new ...
January 29, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
No take-backs!
Meteorite enthusiasts—c'mon, what's not to love about a meteorite?—are abuzz over the news that the "Lorton meteorite," which smashed through the roof of a medical office outside Washington, D.C., on January 18, is the chondrite du jour in a controversy over who owns it.Doctors Marc Gallini and Fra...
January 29, 2010
| By Pat Trenner
The Daily Planet Blog
Asteroid Insurance
Remember we told you the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) would be good at spotting near-Earth asteroids?Well, it is. And it has.Here (the red dot at center) is WISE's first find, a half-mile-wide chunk of rock called 2010 AB78, currently about 98 million miles from Earth. It's no threat,...
January 28, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
The Daily Planet Blog
Sound Barrier Buster
On August 16, 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of the gondola of a balloon at 102,800 feet above New Mexico wearing a pressure suit. In the thin air, he accelerated to 614 miles an hour in free fall before denser atmosphere slowed his plunge to a speed that allowed him to open...
January 26, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
The Once and Future Moon Blog
Have We Forgotten What Exploration Means?
Yet again, the U.S. space program is in the slough of despond, whereby previous assumptions are questioned, the current path is discarded, the program is re-directed, and luminous enthusiasm heralds the new direction…And then it all tapers off to nothing.As long as we are navel-gazing during this p...
January 25, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Daily Planet Blog
Lasers High and Low
Boeing has released this video of a test conducted at the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Alabama last September, during which the ground-based Laser Avenger weapon blew up 50 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of the kind used against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mounted on an armored vehicle,...
January 25, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
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