Aerospace
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What Lies Beneath
You don't have to go to the moon to find out what it's made of.
May 2010 |
By Michael Klesius
The Pride of Cherry Grove
With little more than Bernard Pietenpol's plans, anybody could build an airplane.
May 2010 |
By Marshall Lumsden
Simply the Best
Is there an airshow fan alive who doesn't know the legend riding beneath that hat?
May 2010 |
By Debbie Gary
Browsing the Webb
The James Webb Space Telescope just cleared its most significant milestone, the Mission Critical Design Review. This means that the orbiting infrared observatory, scheduled to launch on an Ariane 5 rocket no earlier than June 2014 into orbit around the sun, about a million miles from Earth, is expe...
April 29, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Back to Normal
After being shut down due to worries about volcanic ash choking jet engines, air traffic resumed over Europe last week, as seen in this visualization produced by the folks at ITO World.
April 28, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Power of the Pen
Still picking yourself up off the floor after reading our recent post about the $152,000 that was paid at auction for Neil Armstrong's autograph, along with his famous "one small step" quote, written on a sheet of the Apollo 11 flight plan?Here's what Armstrong had to say in his 2005 biography by J...
April 26, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Manhigh Pioneer David Simons, 1922-2010
Six weeks before Sputnik 1 ushered in the Space Age, and four years before Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1 flight, an adventurous young biomedical researcher named David Simons climbed to the edge of space inside a pressurized capsule, as part of a project called Manhigh. As we wrote in an article publishe...
April 23, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
The Sun in Hi-Def
New hi-definition movies of the Sun, from NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory. Mesmerizing.
April 23, 2010 |
By Tony Reichhardt
X-37: Ready for Launch
On Thursday, April 22, the U.S. Air Force will finally launch its little, unmanned X-37 orbital spaceplane on top of an Atlas V rocket. The liftoff, which will take place in a window between 7:52 p.m. and 8:01 p.m., will mark the culmination of years of development for the newest U.S. spacecraft—an...
April 21, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
Stealth: Flying Invisible
In March 1999, during the Kosovo War, as Lieutenant Colonel Dale Zelko piloted his F-117, he saw two missiles punch through the bottom of the clouds. The unbelievable had happened: A Serbian surface-to-air missile had locked on to his aircraft. Zelko was able to eject, and was rescued shortly after...
April 19, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
240,000-mile Filing Extension
"Dear Mr. Taxman: I'm sorry I missed the deadline. I was, uh, hmm, in a spaceship flying to the moon?"On the evening of April 15, 2010, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's John H. Glenn lecture series honored four legendary men of Apollo 13 on the 40th anniversary of their hair-raising ...
April 16, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
“We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there.”
During a carefully staged appearance at Kennedy Space Center yesterday, President Barack Obama rolled out his plans for the U. S. space program. Although there weren’t many surprises (the White House Office of Science and Technology, under the direction of John P. Holdren, had released a fact shee...
April 16, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Momentous Memorabilia
“Well I can’t say that this thing hasn’t been filled with excitement,” said astronaut Jim Lovell as Apollo 13's crew crowded into the Command Module Odyssey—following the explosion of an onboard tank in the Service Module—and headed back to Earth. CapCom immediately joked, "Well, James, if you can'...
April 15, 2010 |
By Rebecca Maksel
Seven Slow Seconds
As opponents and advocates square off in Congress this year over the future of NASA's human spaceflight program, expect fireworks. But don't expect anything to happen too quickly. Kind of like this super-slo-mo video, which should bring out the pyro in you: the seven-seconds that the space shuttle ...
April 14, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
To Do The Heavy Lifting
A recent talking points memo by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) seeks to clarify some aspects of the new direction in regards to the cancelled Project Constellation. Touted by some as “compromise,” it asserts that NASA will develop and build a new “Orion lite” crew vehicle whose...
April 14, 2010 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Apollo 13: Eyewitness to the Explosion
"Odyssey, You Have a Problem."If five men in Houston had realized what they were seeing through a telescope on the evening of April 13, 1970, they could have radioed those words to the crew of Apollo 13, who was still trying to grasp what had just happened: an oxygen tank on their spacecraft had ex...
April 12, 2010 |
By Mike Klesius
