A natural gas leak prompted the evacuation of several buildings at Kennedy Space Center today, including the Vehicle Assembly Building and the Orbiter Processing Facility.
On Monday Stardust did a final mid-course correction in anticipation of its February 14 fly-by of of Comet Tempel 1.
The crew of a simulated 500 day long Mars mission has reached “Mars orbit” after 8 months of confinement in a facility in Russia.
Russia regains contact with missing military satellite, finds that it was placed in the wrong orbit.
An evening pause: On this day eight years ago, the space shuttle Columbia broke up as it returned from orbit. Rather than watch that sad sight again, I’d rather remember the shuttle’s achievements. Watch this footage of Columbia’s first landing on April 14, 1981, which proved it was possible to glide powerless back from space and land safely on a runway. Though we as a nation might be abandoning this approach right now, future generations will use this as their standard way to return to Earth.
Several things to note as you watch the video. First, the shuttle’s angle of descent is extremely and frighteningly steep, until the very last moment. And every shuttle landing is like this. The shuttle is heavy, but it is still attempting to glide powerless to a landing. To do so it needs the thickness of the atmosphere combined with high speed to give it lift. Thus, it plows downward at a mucher higher speed and angle than any airplane, then quickly levels out at the last moment.
Secondly, this first landing did not have a drogue chute to slow the shuttle down. Rather than complicate things, they simply let the shuttle roll until it came to a stop.
Using fishing nets to catch space junk.
Discovery has once again rolled out to the launch pad for its final mission.
The Air Force’s second X-37B space plane is now scheduled for a March 4 launch. Key quote:
“We want to be able to put an object up into space, materials, technology and so forth, test them out, bring them back and examine them,” said Richard McKinney, deputy under secretary of the Air Force for space programs. “In that respect, this is a test vehicle.”
A look back at the V2 rocket.
The chimp that took America into space.
Bring on those private space stations! Bigelow Aerospace has signed an agreement with Dubai and United Arab Emirates.
