The X-37B: The Air Force admits it has a fleet of two, does not plan on increasing the size of that fleet, but also plans many more missions for both spacecraft.
An astronaut answers hundreds of questions about his flight to ISS on Reddit.
Twenty-four First World problems solved.
Want to go hiking? You can now hike some of the country’s best trails, from the comfort of your home!
Hallelujah! NASA is considering doing a simulated 500 day Mars mission on ISS.
The Russians want to do this badly, and have been pressing NASA to go along, with no luck, for more than a decade. That it took that long for NASA to finally realize the need tells us much about the American space agency.
With the help of Google Earth, a lost section of the Great Wall of China has been discovered in the Gobi Desert outside of present-day China.
New measurements suggest that Venice continues to sink, and is even listing as it goes down.
The scientists throw in sea level rise as a contributing factor, but don’t really have good data to prove that. Moreover, sea level rise cannot account for the tilt.
Isn’t it nice to live in a free country? The FAA has issued a draft environmental impact statement, required before the agency will allow SpaceShipTwo to be launched from the Mohave Air and Space Port.
If the Wright Brothers had had to jump through the modern bureaucratic hoops required by today’s federal government, they probably wouldn’t have gotten their airplane off the ground until after World War I.
Aviation Week looks at the launch challenges facing SpaceX over the next two years.
Though it is very clear SpaceX has a tough schedule of launches coming up, with much of the future of American aerospace riding on their success, this article is strangely hostile to the company. There is no doubt the company has fallen behind schedule, but the list of customers who have been willing to commit to the company is quite impressive, especially considering that SpaceX literally didn’t exist six years ago.
I’ll make several predictions:
Investment opportunity: Two Sandia National Laboratories researchers are seeking a partnership with a private company to market the self-guided bullet they developed.
The prototype design is a four-inch long bullet with a built-in optical sensor in its nose to detect a laser beam on the target. The sensor directs guidance and control information using an algorithm and a small central processing unit that helps steer tiny built-in fins to guide the bullet. According to the Sandia lab’s computer simulations, an unguided bullet in real world conditions can miss a target that is half a mile away by almost 10 yards. With this guided bullet, however, it could strike within eight inches of a target.
Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner, aiming to complete a record-setting 120,000 foot dive from edge of space, successfully completed a 71,581 foot practice dive today.
From launch to touchdown, the entire test flight lasted just over eight minutes, officials said. According to Baumgartner, the toughest part of the leap was the extreme cold he experienced high up in Earth’s atmosphere. “I could hardly move my hands,” the skydiver said in a statement. “We’re going to have to do some work on that aspect.”
Baumgartner is gearing up for an even bigger leap — his so-called “space jump” — from 120,000 feet (36,576 m) this summer. The current record for highest-altitude skydive is 102,800 feet (31,333 m), set in 1960 by U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger.
Thank you Barack! Europe, dumped by Obama administration and NASA, has teamed up with Russia to build its ExoMars orbiter and lander.
SpaceX has now set April 30 as the target launch date for its Falcon 9/Dragon capsule test flight to ISS.
A prototype of a new space junk radar system has successfully demonstrated it can track objects smaller than an inch across.
This resolution is considered ten times better than previous designs. The cost to build the fully operational system is estimated to be $3.5 billion.
I wonder where we will get the money.
An artist’s conception of Martian weather. With pictures.
Competition rules! Russia’s space agency has proposed a space exploration plan through 2030, including missions to the Moon and Mars, in an effort to catch up with the U.S.
Research on ISS has found that prolonged spaceflight causes vision problems and might even damage the human eye.
There had been hints of this discovery in an earlier report, but today’s paper is the first published science on the subject.
The results are not only important for finding out the medical challenges of weightlessness. They illustrate once again the need to do long extended flights on ISS. Without that research we are never going to be able to fly humans to other planets.
Venus Express was blinded for four days last week after being hit by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun.
The robot rules: Dextre has successfully completed its first round of operations in its satellite refueling demonstration on ISS.
On March 6, film director and deep water diver James Cameron grabbed the record for the deepest solo dive ever, 26791 feet or more than five miles.
Moreover, this dive was only practice for an even deeper dive to come.
Want a job building spaceships? The spaceship companies in Mohave are hiring.
There are several hundred open positions in Mojave as companies such as the Spaceship Company, XCOR and Scaled Composites begin to ramp up operations. “It’s ironic that we’re having a recruitment problem in Mojave,” said Stu Witt, CEO and general manager of the Mojave Air and Space Port. He added that this is a good problem to have.
A look at China’s rocket engine development program.
The detailed look at the robotic satellite refueling demo that is taking place on ISS this week.
From Consumer Reports: “Our Fisker Karma cost us $107,850. It is super sleek, high-tech—and now it’s broken.”
Another wise business choice by the Obama administration, which gave this electric car company just over a half billion dollars in federal subsidies to develop this plug-in hybrid car.
Researchers have completed the first comprehensive map of the entire ocean-floor debris field of the Titanic.
Engineers’ dreams: A proposal to use a thousand mile long magnetic track to accelerate passengers into space.
A robotic refueling demo. designed and built by the same people who ran the Hubble Space Telescope repair missions, begins today on ISS, using Dextre.
This demo is designed to prove that a robot, operated from the ground, can refuel a satellite not designed for refueling. The demo satellite on ISS was built to match the design of several climate satellites already in orbit that will end up defunct in a few years if they can’t be refueled.
The rail gun: a cheap solution for getting payloads into orbit quickly.
