The Science Behind “America Declassified” – White Sands

Unintended Consequences My adventures as a scientist-host with the Travel Channel television series, “America Declassified” took me across the blinding flats of the White Sands Missile Range, which had unintended consequences. Unnervingly, it deposited a sliver in my mind that I simply cannot ignore. In forging outward across the staggeringly-immense, derelict runways we now know […]

Room with a (global) view

When you gaze outside of your spacecraft, what do you see? What’s it really like to be there? With the advent of digital photography in the hands of determined astronauts willing to make time to steal moments to snap images like the above, now we can know. Have a look. Blow the image up with a click. […]

Plans afoot for snaring a space rock

Researchers at the Tsinghua University in Beijing recently published a plan just daring enough to work/make people nervous. After an extensive review of the orbits of thousands of candidate near-Earth objects, the research team headed by Associate Professor Baoyin Hexi identified a small asteroid that with a nudge at the opportune moment would settle into […]

Summer Hits: Martian Water, Asteroid Nukes, Orbital Antimatter!

Here’s a recap of some of this summer’s greatest hits in space news that you might have missed: Water on Mars In an utterly tantalizing development, scientists analyzing imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have announced what appears for all the world to be direct evidence of water on Mars! Because the MRO has […]

Japanese lunar light farming

Definition of mixed emotions: Reading an ambitious plan recently released by the Shimizu Corporation of Japan that effectively wields fear of radiation to incentivize lunar colonization for solar power generation. Wow. While I abhor anything that preys upon the irrational fear of nuclear energy, I’m all for the use of solar power. (I’d like to make the ironic […]

NASA exploration goal to be announced

A NASA media advisory released yesterday alerted the world to what may be a landmark announcement later this afternoon. Specifically, the advisory states that an agency decision has defined the need for a human “deep space” transportation system. What does this tell us? Well, if we visit NASA’s exploration website, the first story would have […]

Finding the incentive to settle space…

To many, the outward expansion of humanity into the cosmos is inevitable. It seems that a portion of our population is (and has always been) innately possessed of a drive toward the frontier, wherever that might be at the time… Whether venturing to the New World, exploring the farthest reaches of the Earth’s poles, probing the abyssal oceanic depths, or rocketing […]

Following Lockheed Martin’s “Stepping Stones” to Mars

The wake of the cancellation of NASA’s Constellation Program has been devastating to Lockheed Martin’s Orion spacecraft plans. They had been counting on the subsequently-canceled Ares series of rockets to loft Orion to the International Space Station (ISS) as a replacement for the retiring Space Shuttle, with eventual plans as the command module for future […]

Excalibur back in British Isles!

…commercial spacecraft manufacturer/provider Excalibur Almaz (EA), that is. And they ferried two partially-constructed commercial space stations with them. A primary competitor to Bigelow Aerospace on the commercial space station frontier, EA has leveraged 20th-Century Russian military space technology in a bid to accelerate a fully-functioning private spaceflight program to orbit. Because it is based on […]

Bigelow Aerospace preps new digs

It appears, in the interest of furnishing the new space digs (read: inflatable orbital space modules) they’re poised to launch, Bigelow Aerospace has secured a partially exclusive license from NASA. The license is for the cryptically entitled, “Apparatus For Integrating A Rigid Structure Into A Flexible Wall Of An Inflatable Structure,” – or as I […]