Aerospace
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Hit Me WIth Your Best Shot
Our photo editor offers 12 tips to make your airshow album a work of art.
May 2009 |
By Caroline Sheen
Remembering the fall of Saigon
On this day in 1975, the last Americans were airlifted from Saigon, bringing an end to the war in Vietnam. Fred Reed, who was a news reporter at the time, was "determined to stay until the end." His account of being evacuated in the middle of the night in a darkened C-130 appeared in our June 1992 ...
April 30, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
The Deadly Dust of the Moon
Lunar dust sticks to everything! It’s electrically charged! It causes silicosis – astronauts on the Moon will get “black lung” disease, just like coal miners on Earth! It’s so abrasive that under its obnoxious influence, moving parts slowly grind to a halt! We can’t possibly cope with it! So m...
April 24, 2009 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Goodwill Mission
To residents of Florida’s Gulf Coast, the Joint Strike Fighter says “Won’t you be my neighbor?”
April 24, 2009 |
By Richard P. Hallion
Our first look back at Earth
It isn't the most famous image from the Apollo 8 mission, nor the best. But this 70 mm Hasselblad camera frame (AS08-16-2593) is the first photograph of the full Earth taken by a human being.Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders were barely three hours into their historic first voyage to the...
April 22, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
California's Space Clout
Yesterday, the California Space Authority kicked off California Space Week Washington, D.C., when representatives from the Golden State's space industry head east for an annual business trip to the nation's capital for face time with all the right people. As their web site says, "It's that time aga...
April 21, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
Another big moment for Elon Musk
At 37 years old, Elon Musk is poised to become either the Henry Ford or the Howard Hughes of his generation. If his Falcon rockets and Tesla electric cars succeed, he'll revolutionize 21st century transportation. If they don't, he'll likely be remembered as a colorful, clever, but ultimately irrele...
April 20, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Hold the F-22s, Order More F-35s
After much lobbying and posturing on both sides, there appears to be a decision: The Air Force will cap production of the F-22 fighter at 187 airplanes, according to an op-ed by Air Force secretary Michael Donley and chief of staff Gen. Norton Schwartz (link requires registration) in yesterday's Wa...
April 14, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Those were the days….
An item caught my eye this morning as I scanned the space news of the day. A famous aerospace facility, the TRW Capistrano Test Site in southern California is closing. The closure of a space facility is hardly news. In fact, such a headline could have been written any time over the last 20 years...
April 10, 2009 |
By Paul D. Spudis
Marine One
Meet J.T. Bachmann, the first USMC pilot to fly the Joint Strike Fighter.
April 09, 2009 |
By Michael Klesius
The Seven
In 1959, a group of military pilots became Astronaut Heroes overnight, and created an American icon that survives to this day.
April 07, 2009 |
By Matthew Hersch
A Humanoid Robot on the Moon?
A task force reporting to the Japanese Prime Minister has established a goal of landing a two-legged robot on the moon around 2020, according to press accounts. The report itself doesn't appear to be online yet, at least not in English. And such grand plans rarely unfold according to timetables set...
April 06, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Volcanoes from Space
This website run by the University of Wisconsin at Madison has lots of interesting satellite views of the recent eruption of Mt. Redoubt in Alaska, including this one taken by the Japanese MTSAT-1R weather satellite, showing a black plume rising high into the atmosphere (see the animated version...
April 03, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
moon vs. Moon: A Study in Arrant Pedantry
When you write, do you capitalize the word “Moon?” And by this, I mean Earth’s Moon, Luna, the natural satellite of our home planet. Well, believe it or not, some of the longest, most vociferous, and yes – the dumbest – arguments I’ve ever had were over this issue.In the preface of my book, The O...
April 02, 2009 |
By Paul D. Spudis
The Meaning of Luck
Got time to kill this year? Consider blunting your teeth on the 648-page tome First Man, the 2005 authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, by James R. Hansen. Exhaustively researched doesn't quite do justice to the book, which starts off excavating Armstrong's roots back to 13th century Scotland, wh...
March 31, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
Mini-SAR nears completion of its first mapping cycle
The Mini-SAR imaging radar aboard the Indian Chandryaan-1 spacecraft currently orbiting the Moon has been sending back some amazing images for the last couple of months. We are nearing the end of our first radar mapping season (which occurs when the sun illumination conditions on the Moon are unfa...
March 29, 2009 |
By Paul D. Spudis
A Rare Space Rock Gets Even Rarer
For the first time, scientists have recovered pieces of a rock tracked all the way from space to its meteoric demise in Earth’s atmosphere. And for the first time, Westerners are hearing how that fireball (which we wrote about in our April/May 2009 issue) appeared to people on the ground in norther...
March 25, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
