The Ultimate Seven Minutes of Terror – Riding the MOOSE
In the early morning hours of August 6, 2012, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory also known as the Mars rover Curiosity will begin a harrowing descent through the thin martian atmosphere. For seven minutes, the fate of the $2.5 billion dollar rover will depend on a flawless performance by largely...
NASA Plans: Asteroid or Bust
For those of us that passionately support the manned space program, there was a glimmer of hope in the news articles circulating yesterday that NASA was narrowing down targets to send human visitors to an asteroid. Sounds exciting and this would make for some great “Kodak moments” along with...
Hawking: Beware Hostile Aliens Seeking Earth’s Treasure
Yesterday, there was the announcement of the discovery of five large planets orbiting the star HD 10180, 126 light years from Earth with the possibility of two additional smaller planets also in that system. The findings indicate that the planets orbit their star in a pattern that resembles the...
Good News, Bad News….
The Senate passed the NASA Authorization Bill that put the American space program somewhere in the middle between the drastic retooling that the Obama Administration had sought and the “stay the course” approach outlined in the Vision for Space Exploration. There are a few things we should never compromise...
Earth Day 2009
It seems only appropriate on Earth Day 2009 to talk about our planet in the scope of the much bigger scale of time and space. Are we the six billion human residents on this planet along with the other animals, insects and microbes all there is in this vast...
Learning a Lesson: The Colbert Conundrum
NASA is learning the power of the internet and social computing – the hard way. NASA has one of the better sites on the web with a good design with a wealth of news, feeds, archival data, and multimedia to be experienced and enjoyed by all followers of the...
NASA Vision Keeps Going
When President Barack Obama indicated in his speech Tuesday night that everyone would have to make sacrifices and everyone’s favorite programs would have to take hits it sent shudders through the space community. Despite frequently relying on analogies related to the space program as examples of what America can...
War and Space
Civilization has known war and conflict all throughout its history. The Second World War gave birth to the space age, but long before that battle humans gazed at the sky and dreamed of what existed beyond the reaches of Earth while on the ground the use of rockets was...