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More Animals Aloft  
3/9/2010 2:53 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Roscoe Turner at left, Gilmore, and Donald Young, Turner s mechanic. Courtesy NASM. You're wandering through the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center when you notice the parachute. An extremely small parachute. This thing couldn't keep Anne Morrow Lindbergh aloft. So who...


Help for the Orbiting Astronaut  
3/8/2010 1:35 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) This is the kind of thing that shows just how weirdly connected we've all become. The other day Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi was up on the space station, downloading pictures via Twitter that he'd taken out the window. He asked if anybody could identify a weird hexagonal shape in...


Space Toys  
3/5/2010 3:52 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Courtesy Art Knowledge News and Dan Morphy s February 26-27, 2010 auction. Space toys can be big business. In 2007, a toy Robby the Robot inspired by the 1956 movie Forbidden Planet was given a retail estimate of $4,500. But that's chump change compared to what Masudaya's Target Robot (right)...


Apollo Legends, On the Road Again  
3/3/2010 9:53 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) When Bob Hope took Neil Armstrong to Southeast Asia with the USO Tour a few months after the Apollo 11 moon landing, the troops at each show gave the astronaut and former Navy fighter pilot standing ovations whenever he walked on stage . Armstrong will travel abroad again to bolster troop moral,...


Phobos Up Close  
3/2/2010 9:41 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Phobos as seen by Mars Express from 200 kilometers away in 2004. Tomorrow the spacecraft will get three times closer. Given all the angst recently about NASA astronauts needing a new destination, it's good to step back and review the options. There aren't many. There's the moon, of course, and...


The First Supersonic Bail-Out  
2/26/2010 6:49 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) How does it feel to eject from an aircraft going nearly 800 miles per hour? Terrible. But test pilot George Smith managed to survive his harrowing ordeal on this day in 1955, after bailing out of an F-100A diving at Mach 1.05 toward the ocean. As recounted in TIME magazine months later, the 4...


Race and the Space Race  
2/25/2010 3:15 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Mae Jemison training for her shuttle flight in 1992. PRX Radio ran an interesting piece over the weekend, narrated by former astronaut Mae Jemison, about race and the early space program. NASA and the civil rights movement came of age in the same decade, and by chance, the agency's main center...


New Lightning  
2/24/2010 9:01 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Last week, a third Lockheed Martin F-35B—the coolest variant of the F-35, with its ability to take off vertically then go supersonic—joined two others already undergoing flight tests at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland. (It's shown here leaving the Lockheed facility in Fort...


More Detail From NASA  
2/23/2010 8:22 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Those who say NASA is giving up on human space exploration may want to take a look at the details the agency just released about where its budgeted money is going over the next several years. The table on page EXP-3 of this document shows more than $15 billion over the next five years allocated for...


Falcon 9 on the Launch Pad  
2/22/2010 8:27 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Chris Thompson/SpaceX SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket—which the company hopes will usher in a new era of lower-cost commercial space travel—has arrived at its launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Engineers are checking out the vehicle's fuel, liquid oxygen, and gas pressure systems. Once they pa...


The Capt. Marlon Green  
2/19/2010 9:15 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) When Marlon Green wanted a flying job with Continental Airlines more than 50 years ago, the company wouldn't give him the time of day. Now they've named an airplane after him. Green, who died last year at the age of 80, had to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court to get hired as the f...


Bill Gordon, Father of the Arecibo Observatory  
2/19/2010 4:02 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) The Arecibo Observatory under construction in 1961... ...and as it looks today. (NAIC / NSF) William Gordon, the Cornell University engineer who dreamed up the world's largest dish antenna, died this week at the age of 92 . His recollections of the Arecibo Telescope's early days were incl...


A Diving Rate  
2/13/2010 1:49 AM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) The United States Parachute Association has released the good news that 2009 marked the lowest skydiving fatality rate for one year in almost half a century: 16 deaths in nearly three million jumps by over 32,000 USPA members at 220 drop zones across the U.S. Of those three million, 400,000 were by...


And Now, Starring the Sun  
2/11/2010 4:44 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) Quick, what's the most photogenic object in our solar system? Earth? Yeah, pretty. Saturn? Lovely rings. But for sheer drama and majesty, it's hard to beat pictures of the sun taken from spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO . Those satellites are about to be eclipsed (sorry) by the Solar Dynamics Obs...


The Price of Human Spaceflight  
2/4/2010 6:28 PM     Read   Share  
(SUMMARY) So NASA's Constellation program is dead . No more Ares rockets, no government-funded Orion capsule. With all due respect to the engineers who worked on the program, we're better off without it. After six years and $9 billion spent, Constellation only managed a single suborbital test launch—of...


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