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 36 of 45
If collecting space memorabilia is your thing, check out the 2009 April Signature Space Exploration Auction. Among the items up for bid from astronauts' personal collections are the bifocals John Young wore on the first Spacelab flight (right), a hand controller grip used by Gene Cernan during the...
March 09, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
A couple more interesting things about the just-launched Kepler telescope—then we'll let it get on with the business of searching for distant planets. The spacecraft will be controlled, at times, by college kids working alongside professional operators. Kepler continues a NASA trend to turn over da...
March 09, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Fingers crossed for Friday night’s planned launch of the Kepler telescope to search for Earth-size planets around other stars. The odds of getting off the ground safely are good: the Delta II is one of the most reliable rockets ever built. Still, ask the people who spent the better part of a decade...
March 06, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
Cue the Lawrence of Arabia theme. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera took this picture of the hardy Opportunity rover trekking across Martian sand dunes on its way to Endeavour crater, its next target to explore. The 10-mile journey is expected to take about two years at a pace of 100...
March 05, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
In this case, a belly laugh. A recent issue of Rockets Magazine featured several stories on amateur rocketry conventions, one of which, "Balls-17," held last September in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, included the launch of a 322-pound homebuilt rocket named "Hold My Beer, Watch This."Just before lau...
March 04, 2009
| By Pat Trenner
The discussion at Space Politics got me thinking about the scientific value of human spaceflight. Although there are many reasons for humans to go into space, I also believe that humans bring unique and non-duplicative skills to scientific exploration as well.Last time, I discussed how the capabil...
March 01, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
There is a brief but vociferous debate about the value of human spaceflight over at Space Politics, under a discussion of the new NASA proposed budget. An often expressed opinion is that in general, humans contribute little to the scientific exploration of space. Indeed, my scientific colleagues ...
February 28, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
Jupiter’s moon Europa is a worthy target for exploration, so don’t get me wrong. It’s good news that NASA and the European Space Agency are going forward with plans for a dual-spacecraft mission to Europa, Ganymede and Jupiter's other moons in 2020. It just means we won’t see balloons flying over S...
February 27, 2009
| By Tony Reichhardt
There seems to be no end of new “strategic plans” designed to “save” our nation’s space program from the purgatory of mediocrity. The latest entry into the strategic planning sweepstakes comes from the Baker Institute at Rice University. Originally, I had planned to say nothing about this report,...
February 20, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
Where do you take your next vacation after you’ve been to space? If you’re billionaire Charles Simonyi, you go back.
February 19, 2009
| By Irene Klotz
Finding another Earth may be easier than the Kepler project's long quest for funding.
May 2003
| By Andrew Lawler
When choosing landing gear for Mars spacecraft, engineers have to weigh their options-literally.
August 2007
| By Tony Reichhardt
We’ve known since the beginning of the space age that the Moon has no global magnetic field. Before we returned samples from the Moon, this was thought to be well understood – compared to Earth, the Moon is a small body (1% the mass) and it rotates very slowly (almost 30 times slower). The large ...
February 08, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
Miles O’Brien, late of CNN, recently wrote a column reflecting on the accomplishment of the Apollo program and the space program since then. He believes that Apollo was a great leap forward in space, a capability and step from which we then walked away. O’Brien asks why the country has turned its...
January 25, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
How the Ranger probes’ moon crashes helped pave the way for Apollo.
January 21, 2009
| By Paul Hoversten
The first images obtained by the Mini-SAR radar instrument aboard the Indian Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, currently orbiting the Moon, were released yesterday. Although the spacecraft arrived last November, we are only now getting ready to map the poles of the Moon. The data released are test images...
January 17, 2009
| By Paul D. Spudis
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