Fifty years ago today,
John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. In an recent interview, he lamented the decline of the manned US space program: "It's unseemly to me that here we are, supposedly the world's greatest space-faring nation, and we don't even have a way to get back and forth to our own International Space Station."
[more inside]
posted by dsfan
on Feb 20, 2012 -
80 comments
Built as part of the fifth
/dev/fort developer retreat,
Spacelog.org allows you to explore early space missions via the original NASA transcripts. Currently live are
Mercury 6 which made John Glenn the first American in orbit, and the 'successful failure'
Apollo 13 (The transcribed
key moment and the
original). Alongside the transcripts are supporting materials from the NASA archives including
photography and descriptions of the
mission phases. The developers are
looking for help to digitise the Gemini 7, Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions.
posted by garrett
on Dec 1, 2010 -
11 comments
Spacehack "A directory of ways to participate in space exploration. Interact and connect with the space community."
posted by chrismear
on Aug 4, 2009 -
6 comments
Moonbase Visions. You've
read about and
discussed NASA's plan to use
new post-shuttle launch vehicles to return to the moon.
But what, exactly, is the US planning to
do on the moon? What would a semi-permanent moonbase look like? And why return at all? NASA's announced answers to these questions remain vague. But last year eleven sets of responses to these questions were offered to NASA in
the development proposals submitted to NASA by eleven Aerospace concerns, each of which suggested different designs, missions, and philosophies for NASA's return to the moon. Some common themes:
Military:
"Provide nationally assured access to orbital locations for the placement of observation systems" and "assured access to space for development of force projection systems and movements of logistics." (pdf link, p. 5)
Commercial:
"Commercialize space products and services" (pdf link, p.6)
Public Relations:
Keeping the public inspired with "regularly placed program milestones." (pdf link, p.7)
It's interesting to compare the details of these proposals. But taken together, they raise a broader question: does NASA's fear that the public will lose interest in this commercializing, militarizing, moon venture reflect an awareness that that
the vision has finally been lost?
posted by washburn
on Sep 22, 2005 -
62 comments
Alien planet "The drama takes place on Darwin IV, a fictional planet 6.5 light-years from Earth, with two suns and 60 percent gravity. Having identified Darwin as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the mothership and three probes." Discovery channel feature, Flash heavy site, via
Pharyngula.
posted by dhruva
on May 9, 2005 -
20 comments
Cartography is a skill pretty much taken for granted now, but it
wasn't always
so. Accurate maps were once prized state secrets, laborious efforts that cost a fortune and took years (or even decades) to complete.
How things have changed. (Yours now,
$110) It took almost 500 years to map North America, but it's only taken one tenth of that to map just everything else. In the last 50 years, we've been able to create acurate atlases of
two planets and
one moon (with a
second in the works). Actually,
we've done a lot more than that. We're actually running out of things to map.
Maybe Not.
posted by absalom
on Jan 27, 2005 -
17 comments
Mars, take II - Still no word from
Beagle 2 (discussed
here), unfortunately, as Mars maintains its tough reputation. However, the first of two rovers much larger than 1997's very successful Pathfinder is expected to hit the Martian surface with a giant bounce tonight at 8:35 p.m. PST. Check out the
realistic simulation videos of how it will land and get to work, then watch
Nasa TV (RealVideo) for live coverage.
posted by planetkyoto
on Jan 3, 2004 -
51 comments
The romance versus the reality of man in space. According to this article, unless NASA gets an innoculation of a whole bunch of money, we are likely to be limited to maintaining no more than three longterm residents of the space station we are committed to building. How does this bode for our Star Trek vision?
posted by MAYORBOB
on Dec 5, 2001 -
18 comments
