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 15 of 45
Quick: What’s the strangest way to deliver mail that you can think of? By mule? On foot? By ship? By airplane? How about by missile? That’s right. More than one person thought delivering packages by rocket was an excellent idea. Our neighbor, the National Postal Museum, notes that Austria and Germany were the first countries [...]
July 01, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
Wallops Island and I don’t get along. Twice in the last two years I’ve made the long drive from my home in ex-urban Washington D.C., hoping to finally see an orbital launch from this quaint and historic launch site on Virginia’s eastern shore. Twice I’ve come away empty-handed. It happened for the second time Tuesday [...]
June 30, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
By moving forward on their mission to convert the U.S. fleet of Space Shuttles into museum pieces, the administration has shifted NASA into neutral. America’s multi-billion dollar investment in the International Space Station (ISS) and our access to space is in jeopardy. As a result of the termination of the Shuttle program, we have no [...]
June 25, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Dawn spacecraft continues to close in on Vesta, one of the last unexplored objects of appreciable size between here and Pluto. Dawn is expected to go into orbit around the asteroid on July 16. This is how Vesta looked in the navigation camera view as of June 20, when Dawn was 117,000 miles away. [...]
June 24, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
How do you pack a $2.5 billion Mars rover for shipment? Here’s how. This time-lapse video, covering a period of five days, shows the Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory being prepared for shipment from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to its launch site in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The journey, scheduled for later this month, will be partly [...]
June 22, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
“Now is the winter of our discontent” – Richard III, Act 1, scene 1 There is a good piece in today’s Telegraph UK by David Robson of a fateful one-hundredth anniversary – the Midwinter Dinner — June 22, 1911 held in Robert Falcon Scott’s Ross Island hut. A year earlier, Scott and the crew of [...]
June 21, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
We don’t generally give shout-outs to fellow bloggers, but in this case it’s deserved: Paul Spudis, who writes the “Once and Future Moon” blog on this site, recently won the National Space Society’s Space Pioneer Award for finding what may be a way out of the doldrums that currently afflict U.S. space policy. That isn’t [...]
June 10, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
The last time we looked in on the European comet-chaser Rosetta, the spacecraft was still years away from its destination. Well, it’s still years away—three to be precise. And it just went into hibernation. But before going to sleep, Rosetta took this first, very long-distance picture of its target: comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Not much to look [...]
June 08, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
Maybe the most amazing thing about this photo is that it took 12 years of docked operations before someone got a picture of the space shuttle attached to the International Space Station. But here it is. Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured this view on May 23 from the departing Soyuz spacecraft. Click on the photo [...]
June 07, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
Not a day goes by without some TV news reporter asking an astronaut or NASA official, “How do you feel now that Americans will have to rely on the Russians to get to orbit?” Folks, we’ve been doing that for 16 years. Tomorrow the Soyuz TMA-02M is scheduled to blast off from Kazakhstan, bound for [...]
June 06, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
At the recent International Space Development Conference in Huntsville, Augustine committee member and CEO of XCOR Aerospace Jeff Greason gave a talk on the goals of human spaceflight. While he discussed many things that I agree with (in particular, making the use of off-planet resources a high priority), one idea in particular stood out. Greason [...]
June 03, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
We’re still not sure whether to take the folks at Copenhagen Suborbitals seriously in their quest (eventually) to launch people into space. But they plan to test-launch their HEAT-1X rocket from the Baltic Sea tomorrow. The last attempt, in September, was ruined by a liquid oxygen valve failure. Now they’ve regrouped for another try, with [...]
June 02, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
This video of Endeavour‘s picture-perfect landing at 2:35 a.m. today offers a little surprise, even for some veteran shuttle watchers. Can you guess what we’re referring to? If you guessed the flickering light at the base of the vertical tail, you’re spot on. And if you stuck with the video to the 1:20 mark, the [...]
June 01, 2011
| By Mike Klesius
Landing a shuttle while re-adapting to gravity can be disorienting. Now there's a way to simulate it on the ground.
May 31, 2011
| By Mark Betancourt
Since 1963, hundreds of artists (and musicians, poets—even one fashion designer) have interpreted NASA’s aeronautic and space projects. The artists were given carte blanche to create what they wanted, in any medium, on any subject. In celebration of NASA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, more than 70 diverse artworks from the program began touring the country [...]
May 27, 2011
| By Rebecca Maksel
A few random thoughts on Day 11 of Endeavour‘s last flight: Tomorrow STS-134 astronaut Mike Fincke will become the U.S. record holder for time spent in space, eclipsing chief astronaut Peggy Whitson’s 377-day mark. Not bad for a guy who once washed out of Air Force fighter pilot training. “My arms weren’t golden enough to [...]
May 26, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
Last night NASA made one last attempt to contact the Spirit Mars rover, which got stuck in the sand two years ago and hadn’t been heard from since March 22. Nobody expected a response after 1200 previous unanswered messages, and sure enough, there was no answer from Mars. So, with the chances of success “practically [...]
May 25, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s special address to Congress – a request for supplemental appropriation for a variety of projects but most famously remembered for the announcement of his Man-Moon-Decade goal of Project Apollo. That event, cited by space advocates and excerpted in space and history documentaries, is remembered as [...]
May 24, 2011
| By Paul D. Spudis
In this time of endings for the space shuttle, there are still a few firsts left. On Saturday morning, Pope Benedict XVI made the first ever papal “visit” (via video link) to astronauts in orbit. In many ways it was an extraordinary conversation, ranging from the future of space exploration to condolences (to Paolo Nespoli [...]
May 23, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
With just one space shuttle flight left to go, every milestone on the current STS-134 mission is poignant for the astronauts and other folks who work on the program, and for those of us who’ve been watching them for a long time. Here’s a scene we’ll see only once more: A shuttle full of astronauts [...]
May 19, 2011
| By Tony Reichhardt
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