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 29 of 45
Score one for the rocket engineers.To quote Ed Mango, the launch director for today’s Ares I-X rocket test, his team at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center did a “frickin’ fantastic” job on their first outing, which gathered data for the designers of NASA’s proposed Ares 1 crew launcher. It appears the eng...
October 28, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
The scrub of today's Ares I-X launch, now scheduled for 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, October 28, is a good reminder of all that can go wrong when launching a new rocket. But the problems that led to today's scrub didn't involve any of the vehicle's technologies, unless you include a lanyard trying to pull o...
October 27, 2009
| By Mike Klesius
The science team of the Japanese Kaguya mission have just published a paper claiming to have found an opening to a cave on the Moon. Such a discovery is a potentially important development for future lunar habitation. Lava tubes are large caves created during the volcanic eruption of a very fluid...
October 27, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
The Near-Earth Object office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports on an October 8 fireball over Indonesia, with a link (below) to a local TV news story.Fireballs are dramatic, but not as rare as you'd think. An object this size (about 10 meters in diameter) comes along every few years, on av...
October 26, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince.In his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described two t...
October 23, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
When did cosmonauts get so hip?The current Russian residents of the International Space Station, Maksim Surayev and Roman Romanenko, are two of the loosest, laughing-est spacemen we've seen in a long time. Maybe it's because they just spent ten days in orbit with a clown.Whatever the reason, Suraye...
October 22, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
On the day of the LCROSS lunar impact, a NASA ground camera normally used to track space shuttle launches caught this video of the International Space Station passing over the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Here's how to see the station for yourself, from your own backyard. (Video: NASA)
October 21, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
There's no shortage of meteorites that have slammed into our planet since its creation. The vast majority of the craters they've left have eroded away or slowly sunk into the Earth through the process of subduction. Still, the Earth Impact Database, the list of confirmed impact craters, maintained ...
October 20, 2009
| By Mike Klesius
NASA has a new rocket on the launch pad for the first time in almost 30 years.The Ares I-X, the first test of the new Ares rocket design, is scheduled for October 27 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This first flight is meant to demonstrate control and staging of the Ares 1 crew launcher, ...
October 20, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
While scientists on the LCROSS mission puzzle over why none of the world's telescopes apparently saw squat during last week's much-ballyhooed lunar impact (although it now appears the spacecraft did), here's a happier story.The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently took this lonely photo of the Sur...
October 16, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
If you know children who are sick with worry about the supposed end of the world in 2012, here's the antidote: a six-page brief by NASA Ames Research Center astrobiologist David Morrison explaining why the whole Mayan calendar scare is a load of nonsense.The doomsday scenario, in case you hadn't he...
October 15, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Just when you thought Saturn's ring situation couldn't get any cooler than the recent equinox photos by Cassini, make way for the mega-ring. Astronomers Anne Verbiscer, Michael Skrutskie, and Douglas Hamilton just announced that they've discovered a fantastically huge ring around Saturn. Their tool...
October 09, 2009
| By Mike Klesius
Friendly warning: Do not be in the moon's Cabeus Crater tomorrow morning. At 7:31 eastern time, a giant, two-and-a-half ton empty rocket stage will come crashing down from the sky at 1.5 miles a second. Four minutes later, another, smaller spacecraft will hit near the same spot. What the...? Ahh, i...
October 08, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
24,000 feet over the Atlantic, east of Long Island, aboard G-Force One, Boeing 727-200 (likely the only 727 spiffed up with winglets). 30 souls on board.“First parabola. Mars gravity, one-third of Earth’s gravity. Try some push-ups.”Oh, piffle. This is nothing “Second parabola. Lunar gravity, one-...
October 06, 2009
| By Pat Trenner
Water is an extremely useful substance in space. The recent finding of water on the Moon has generated considerable comment in the space community; a quick search on Google using the phrase “lunar water” returns over 7.66 million hits. Lunar water’s significance lies not in its role as a medium f...
October 04, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
Okay, that was one of the strangest sendoffs in launch history. Not only did space tourist and Cirque Du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté keep putting on his red clown nose, the whole crew periodically broke into the cheesy pop song "Mammy Blue" as they were getting ready to board their Soyuz rocket f...
September 30, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
The debate over what kind of rocket to use for NASA's exploration program has become so clouded by politics and salesmanship that it's hard for outsiders to tell any more which approach would be best, or even if it's still possible to send people beyond Earth orbit. The Augustine commission says it...
September 29, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
The extreme dryness of the Moon is established scientific dogma. The study of Apollo rock and soil samples pretty much had convinced scientists that the Moon has no water. Because its surface is in a vacuum and experiences extreme temperature swings at the equator (from -150° to 100° C), the Moon ...
September 25, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
It's the biggest open secret in the space community: the Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt will not be leaving for the Red Planet this year, as scheduled, and will have to wait for 2011 when the orbits of Earth and Mars synch up again.The Russian space agency Roscosmos, which is responsible for the e...
September 24, 2009
| By Mike Klesius
For that satellite dish on your roof and the phone calls you make to Japan, you can thank Harold Rosen.
September 2009
| By Guy Gugliotta
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