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 25 of 45
As opponents and advocates square off in Congress this year over the future of NASA's human spaceflight program, expect fireworks. But don't expect anything to happen too quickly. Kind of like this super-slo-mo video, which should bring out the pyro in you: the seven-seconds that the space shuttle ...
April 14, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
A recent talking points memo by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) seeks to clarify some aspects of the new direction in regards to the cancelled Project Constellation. Touted by some as “compromise,” it asserts that NASA will develop and build a new “Orion lite” crew vehicle whose...
April 14, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
"Odyssey, You Have a Problem."If five men in Houston had realized what they were seeing through a telescope on the evening of April 13, 1970, they could have radioed those words to the crew of Apollo 13, who was still trying to grasp what had just happened: an oxygen tank on their spacecraft had ex...
April 12, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
As we survey the wreckage and ruin of yet another NASA “return to the Moon” program, the inevitable “what went wrong?” arguments play out. We’re in a much different place today than we were when Apollo 11 reached the Moon (and each year there are fewer of us alive who witnessed it). To some of us...
April 02, 2010
| By Paul D. Spudis
“The first decade in the Space Age was a unique moment in human history,” says Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator Roger Launius. “For the first time, humanity ventured off its home planet, to explore the moon and elsewhere. And along the way, we experienced both excitement and someti...
April 02, 2010
| By Rebecca Maksel
The first company with a plan—and a rocket—to send humans to orbit answers the existential question.
May 2009
| By Michael Milstein
Looking to add a little acrimony to your life? Join the debate about the Obama Administration's decision to cancel NASA's Constellation Program. That decision would direct commercial companies, such as SpaceX, which already has 27 unmanned flights on its launch manifest, to take over the job of mov...
March 31, 2010
| By Mike Klesius
Maybe it's the advent of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it's because there are only a few space shuttle flights left. But 50 years into the space age, NASA astronauts seem to be loosening up in the way they present themselves to the public.Case in point: this photo posted on the Twitter page of Clayto...
March 30, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
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
Avatar’s creator hopes to direct the first movies shot on Mars.
March 23, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
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
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
NASA's first Flight Director assesses the state of the space program 40 years after Apollo.
March 2010
| By Michael Klesius
You don't have to go to the moon to find out what it's made of.
May 2010
| By Michael Klesius
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
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
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
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
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