SpaceX tested their 9 engine cluster last saturday night! What makes this a killer for me was that they tested it when I was in Waco, and it was tested at the McGregor Muni airport where I did a lot of flying for my private pilot’s license. Man! I wish I’d have known. I never heard the rumble or saw the “orange glow” that the Trib reports on, though. It would have been great to have seen it.
This is Burt Rutan’s White Knight II, the spaceship carrier that will fly me to space someday.
And how cool- how ineffably perfect- are those stencils on the cowling?
many more pictures here.
Cool space pictures here. It’s amazing to me that they’re so clear, but I guess that’s what you get with a high-resolution camera and no atmosphere to soften the image.
One robot screaming through orbit at thousands of miles per hour (the Mars Orbiter) takes a picture of another robot (the Phoenix Lander) as it makes it final approach to landing on Mars (under parachutes). How incredible, amazing, and awe-inspiring is that?
I have to post Boing Boing’s take:
See that thing in this image that looks like a Martian vehicle descending by parachute to the surface of Mars? That’s the Phoenix lander, captured in mid-drop, still glowing from entry into the atmosphere, by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. How badass awesome is it to be a human? Super badass awesome.
I concur.
NASA’s Phoenix Lander is down safe on Mars. What a stressful and dramatic webcast.
Good thing the lander would get an extra life if anything happened.
Cool, the Jindo Sea Passage.
Incredible space shuttle launch prep photo essay here.
Google and Virgin Galactic plan on going to Mars. Couldn’t happen on a better day…
I spent some time cleaning out the library this afternoon. Our “library” is really just the pretentiously named fourth bedroom in our house. Instead of an extra bed there are four bookshelves, a computer, and a lot of other stuff that needed to be sorted, tossed, or re-filed into other categories and locations to be tossed later.
I went through some of my books (they multiply, you know) and came to my Science Fiction section. Had a lot of Asimov books, naturally, a few Brin, Card, Sheffield, and a whole bunch of Arthur C. Clarke. 2001, 2010, 2069, 3001, The Rama series, on and on. I decided that his stuff passed the threshold of keepability (meaning: too good to toss. I chucked some old or outdated or duplicate stuff). So I re-shelved them and thought “gee, I’m going to have to read some of those again soon”. Clarke is one of those seminal, always-present writers in the SF world. His books were a big, big part of my life growing up. He was really the very first science fiction author of any standing that I read in my youth and I always appreciated how his style of writing was clear and complex at the same time. He could get across some pretty intricate ideas in a way that was easy to understand, without talking down to a 12 year old. In spite of his annoying tendency to kill his main characters at the end of his books in order to Make A Bigger Point, I’ve always liked his style of writing.
Clarke made his biggest contributions during the 60’s and 70’s and has been floating serenely on his fame ever since while living in, of all places, Sri Lanka.
I was surprised and saddened to see that Arthur C. Clarke died in his home today at the age of 90. An era has ended.
Wired has posted a short video on SS2. As usual, the media is couching it in all-or-nothing terms (”if they can’t pull it off it might be a long time before you and I might get our spaceflights”). There are a lot of post-deniable weasel words in that kind of reporting, but I’m glad to see Scaled on the job. Of course, if they do pull it off, some other schmuck reporter can just as easily make up another stupid question to rattle the public and investors into thinking the whole project is a deathtrap. My nominations go to the fear-of-lawsuits to environmental worries.
Get the freaking “unbiased” reporters out of the way and let the entrepreneurs do the heavy lifting.
Oh yeah. OH YEAH. SpaceShipTwo was unveiled today. Plans are for test flights to start in June with first commercial flights a year later. Bring it on!
More here.
Yes, there’s cool stuff coming in the Mercury flyby, but I’m more curious who it was that messaged my phone today to tell me to blog about it! Come on, fess up!
Thirty years ago today the Voyager spacecraft started its infinite journey.
The next X-Prize will be announced on Sept 13th. From the website:
“The challenge is extreme, the destination is extraordinary, the prize purse is exceptional.”
I wonder what it will be?
Erin and I got up at 5-something this morning to see the total lunar eclipse. It was a cool visual. When we went to bed the moon was blindingly bright. You could actually see colors and easily read under the glare of the Harsh Mistress. By the time the eclipse was in full swing there was only a ghostly, blood-red orb hanging sullenly in the sky. Beautiful and creepy!
LONDON (Reuters) - Popular mapping service Google Earth will launch a new feature called Sky, a “virtual telescope” that the search engine hopes will turn millions of Internet users into stargazers.
ADVERTISEMENTGoogle, which created Google Earth to give Internet users an astronaut’s view that can zoom to street level, said the service would be a playground for learning about space.
“Never before has a roadmap of the entire sky been made so readily available,” said Dr. Carol Christian of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who co-led the institute’s Sky team.
“Sky in Google Earth will foster and initiate new understanding of the universe by bringing it to everyone’s home computer.”
Like Google Earth, Sky will enable users to float and zoom in on over 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. Users will view the sky as seen from earth.
via Yahoo.
…. like we need another Hole in the Universe.
