Aerospace
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The Force Is With Them
What changes the speed of spacecraft flying by Earth?
September 2010 |
By Sam Kean
Stand up, sit down, fall off
It's not new material, but if you haven't seen this, you owe it to yourself to take a couple minutes to watch. Austrian skydiver Paul Steiner did some ambitious wing walking earlier this year in this Red Bull video, with a pair of Blanix gliders flown by Ewald Roithner and Kurt Tippi high above the...
August 30, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
A.W.O.L.
You may have read about the X-37B, the U.S. Air Force's new unmanned orbital spaceplane, in our January issue. The secretive satellite with space-shuttlesque delta wings made its first launch on April 22 of this year atop an Atlas V rocket, and has been in orbit since, visible on the web via a numb...
August 26, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
The Moon: Creating Capability in Space and Getting Value for our Money
Of all the possible destinations in space, the Moon offers the proximity, accessibility, and materials necessary to learn how to use what we find in space to create new capabilities. Harvesting the resources of the Moon will allow us to make what we need in space, rather than carrying it with us f...
August 24, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Stripped-Down Spaceflight in Denmark
However the Copenhagen Suborbitals project turns out, you have to give these people points for nerve. The eventual plan is to launch a human to an altitude of 100 kilometers inside a capsule barely large enough to fit one person, standing up. For the moment, the Danish team would be happy just to l...
August 24, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Wings of Honor
The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., was built to honor the 16 million Americans who served in the armed forces during that conflict, the more than 400,000 who died, and all who supported their efforts from the homefront. But the Greatest Generation is aging rapidly, and about 1,200 World...
August 20, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
The Incredible Shrinking Moon
Back in the 1970’s Paleolithic age of lunar studies, scientists were busy using images of the Moon in an attempt to understand lunar processes and history. In the rugged ancient cratered uplands of the Moon, they saw something curious. Many small scarps dotted the highlands and were visible in o...
August 19, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Remembering Belka and Strelka
By some definitions, you could say that spaceflight began 50 years ago today.On August 19, 1960, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 5 capsule containing 40 mice, two rats, a rabbit, some fruit flies, plants—and a pair of dogs, Belka ("Whitey") and Strelka ("Little Arrow.") They were the first li...
August 19, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
B-24 Understudy Fills Big Shoes
Just two weeks ago, the Commemorative Air Force returned its B-29 Superfortress, Fifi, to flight after six years of down time while the airplane was fitted with customized engines (maintainers had found metal shavings in the engine oil). The CAF planned to re-launch Fifi as the signature aircraft f...
August 18, 2010 |
By Pat Trenner
Astronomy's To Do List
Every ten years or so, the nation's astronomers put their heads (actually committees) together to come up with a collective wish list for the projects they'd like to see funded over the next decade. Politicians tend to like this method of setting scientific priorities, as it saves them from choosin...
August 13, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
He May Be a Smart Physicist, But...
Here's Stephen Hawking, commenting on humanity’s future:
...Our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only c...
August 11, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Zephyr Goes for the Record
With UAVs becoming more capable and taking on more missions each day, military users are clamoring for one feature in particular: longer dwell time in the air.DARPA's Vulture program aims to build an unmanned vehicle that could stay up for five years. That's still quite a stretch, considering that ...
August 10, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Nobody knows ….. how dry I am
The never-ending saga of water on the Moon continues apace. In the latest revelation, it is now claimed that the Moon is indeed “dry” after all and never had much water (this new finding is only in regard to endogenous lunar water contained inside the Moon, not to water that has been or is being ...
August 07, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Dog Ate My Homework
The cabaret known as the U.S. Air Force's KC-X tanker competition is getting in some high-kicks now, baby. This summer, a little known company with 30 employees called U.S. Aerospace, which had changed its name from New Century only last March, and which has had some recent questions surrounding it...
August 06, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Low Jinks in the Mach Loop
How do you complete a marathon in four minutes? In a jet fighter, of course, at 400-plus knots. That's how this Tornado pilot and others fly the Mach Loop in Wales. The loop is a 26-mile ring of valleys in a region designated by the British military as Low Flying Area 7, one of several such regi...
August 03, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Barnstorming in the Blood
One of the world's most inventive pilots makes everything old look new again.
August 2010 |
By Debbie Gary
Black Day at White Sands
What goes up, must come down. In the Delta Clipper's case, really hard.
August 2010 |
By Preston Lerner
