Stories from Tony Reichhardt
Busy days in Earth orbit.Space Shuttle Discovery is set to make its last voyage tomorrow, with liftoff planned for 4:50 p.m. Florida time. If all goes according to plan, Europe’s Johannes Kepler unmanned cargo vehicle will have docked with the space station earlier in the day (at 10:45 U.S. Eastern…
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When a veteran planet hunter like Debra Fischer calls it the most momentous discovery since 51 Peg, you know it must be big.In 1995, scientists found the first planet circling a normal star outside our solar system—an unassuming yellow dwarf called 51 Pegasi. In the 16 years since, they’ve identifi…
Once you get used to the slightly overcaffeinated host, this is a pretty cool project —to drop a bunch of paper airplanes from a high-altitude balloon and see where they land. The team launched their balloon earlier this month, as the video shows. But, from what I can tell on their website and Twit…
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No, it’s not some freakish genetics experiment. It’s NASA’s Super Guppy transport hauling around a couple of T-38s. Read about it here.
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We probably shouldn’t call them space tourists, even in a headline. The seven people who have visited the International Space Station as paying customers of the Virginia-based booking agency Space Adventures all worked very hard—before, during, and after their flights. None of them spent their time…
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As in any year, there are winners and losers in the 2012 Pentagon budget announced yesterday. The Defense Department plans to buy more Reaper unmanned drones, but the Marine Corps’ short takeoff and landing version of the F-35 was put on two-year “probation,” and may not happen at all. Pretty stand…
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The faces behind the visors
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The EMALS systems gets off the ground, literally
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I was surprised by these photos, but I shouldn’t have been.Most pictures of Russian space crews in the Soyuz TMA vehicle show them squished together like sardines, sitting side by side on their launch “couches.” I’ve always wondered how they can move their arms, let alone get anything done, during …
Lots of space station astronauts have narrated video tours of their digs in space. This one, by current ISS commander Scott Kelly, struck me as more intimate, like a friend showing you around his new house:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4dG9vSyUFQSpeaking of Kelly, the recent slip of his twin brot…
What looks like Ronaldo’s nightmare is in fact the world’s largest soccer ball airship, built by E-Green Technologies of Kellyton, Alabama. Why, you ask? It seems everyone’s crazy about airships these days, for everything from military surveillance to tourism. E-Green just signed a deal with NASA’s…
The second half of the space station Expedition 26 crew headed off to work this afternoon, as Russian Dmitry Kondratyev, Italian Paolo Nespoli, and American Cady Coleman were launched on the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Coleman, a two-time shuttle astronaut, began her six-mont…
Awesome. I love the little blast of air they get at around the 48-second mark.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmxM_CknSZw
Engineers with the Office of Naval Research set a new world record on Friday by firing an electromagnetic railgun “cannon” with an energy of 33 megajoules, or 33 million joules. That would be enough, in an operational system, to shoot a projectile 110 miles from a ship, at speeds up to Mach 5.Here’…
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The man who set the G-force tolerance record
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T-38 pilots fly precariously close over a football game at the University of Iowa
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We’ve come a long way from Madalyn Murray O’Hair.She was, you’ll recall, the activist atheist who campaigned against government sanctioning of religion—including NASA astronauts reading from the Book of Genesis during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968.But times have changed. Even Russians are now carryi…
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Score another one for the extremophiles.Biologists had already discovered organisms that can survive everything from high levels of radiation to vacuum to total darkness. Now they’ve found one that uses arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus, one of the six elements (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxy…
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Having already found more than 500 planets circling distant stars, scientists are getting better at understanding what they’re made of. A group led by Jacob Bean at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports in this week’s Nature that they’ve analyzed the atmosphere of a planet only sl…
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