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Page 26 of 45

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

<b><i>Four years after NASA’s inception</b></i>, agency administrator James Webb saw Bruce Stevenson’s formal portrait of astronaut Alan Shepard, and came up with an unusual idea: to hire artists to be part of NASA’s staff, to illustrate and illuminate the agency’s missions. “Important events can be interpreted by artists to give a unique insight into significant aspects of our history-making advances into space,” Webb wrote in a 1963 press release. “An artistic record of this nation’s program of space exploration will have great value for future generations and may make a significant contribution to the history of American art.” <br><br>Since 1963, hundreds of artists (and musicians, poets—even one fashion designer) have interpreted NASA’s aeronautic and space projects. In celebration of NASA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, more than 70 diverse artworks from the program are touring the country as part of an exhibition titled <i>NASA / ART: 50 Years of Exploration</i>. Click on the images at right to take a closer look at some of the items in the traveling exhibit. Images and text are taken from the exhibition catalog of the same name, written by James Dean and Bertram Ulrich. <br><br>“In May 1963, NASA, with the help of the National Gallery of Art, selected eight artists to document the last Mercury flight, which would transport astronaut Gordon Cooper into the heavens,” write James Dean and Bertram Ulrich in the exhibition catalog. “Seven sketched and painted the subtropical fields around an imposing launchpad while the eighth enduring the pitching and rolling deck of a recovery ship in the Pacific Ocean. The paintings and drawings produced by these eight artists formed the cornerstone of an art collection that spans almost fifty years of American history and currently comprises nearly three thousand works.” <br><br><i>In Power</i>, by Paul Calle (oil on panel, 50 x 58 inches, 1963), “The Atlas launch vehicle, producing 360,000 pounds of thrust, lifts the last Mercury astronaut, Gordon Cooper, into Earth orbit for a thirty-four-hour flight on May 15, 1963—at the time, an American long-duration record.”

A traveling exhibit from the space agency's right brain.
March 09, 2010 | By Rebecca Maksel

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

The 2009 Class of NASA astronauts: All dressed up, but nowhere to go.

For NASA's flying corps, it looks like 1975 all over again.
February 05, 2010 | By Matthew Hersch

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

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

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