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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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 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
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
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 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
Is that what's going on in this Hubble Space Telescope image?
February 02, 2010
| By Tony Reichhardt
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
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







