The annual space party 'Yuri's Night' happens in L.A. on Saturday April 6th, and then in a bunch more cities the following weekend: Washington, DC, Seattle, Colorado Springs, Kennedy Space Center on the Florida Space Coast, April 12-13, 2019. Read the rest
How do you become a spaceship pilot? Read the rest
UPDATE: THEY DID IT. It couldn't have gone more perfectly. Read the rest
"We leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind." These were the last words Eugene Cernan said upon leaving the surface of our moon, at the end of Apollo 17.
Cernan (shown below at the beginning of EVA 3) was the last man to walk on the moon. He died Monday, Jan. 16, surrounded by his family. Read the rest
In the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, reader JMV shares this wonderful scan of a 1952 feature from the Vancouver Sun's "Weekend Picture Magazine" on the coming age of travel to Mars.
Illustration by Edgar Ainsworth.
"It will probably be some 50 years before any safe space flight from Earth to another planet and back is made, but there seems now to be very little doubt that the dreams of Roger Bacon in AD 1249 and Albertus Magnus in 1280 have left the realm of Wellsian imaginings and become a practical proposition."
Here's a larger size. Guess they didn't think of Rovers! Read the rest
Created by combatcameraman on b3ta. Felix the cat! (Via: crackajack.de. Thanks, Tara McGinley)
Parachuting from 120,000 feet - Boing Boing Felix Baumgartner jumps with a parachute from space - BoingBoing Free-fall from stratosphere, live now - Boing Boing Read the rest
Photo: the Aeroscraft in a hangar in CA. Image: Worldwide Aeros, Inc.
In the Los Angeles Times, an article about an aerospace industry boom of sorts in Southern California, involving new twists on an old technology: airships. Who's buying? The military, and other government agencies, primarily for defense and surveillance purposes.
[I]n recent years, the affordability of airships as well as developments in high-definition cameras, high-powered sensors and other unmanned technologies have turned these oddball aircraft from curiosities of a bygone era to must-have items for today's military. And airships increasingly are being used for civilian purposes.
The federal government is buying blimps, zeppelins and spy balloons, and many of these new-generation hybrid "lighter than air" aircraft are taking shape across California.
"So much is going on with airships in California now," Pasternak said. "It wasn't this way 10 years ago."
Of note, the difference between airships, blimps, and zeppelins: Read the rest
Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader and director of CICLOPS in Boulder, CO, writes:
For no other reason than that they are gorgeous, the Cassini imaging team is releasing today a set of fabulous images of Saturn and Titan...in living color...for your day-dreaming enjoyment. Note that our presence at Saturn for the last 8 years has made possible the sighting of subtle changes with time, and one such change is obvious here. As the seasons have advanced, and spring has come to the north and autumn to the south throughout the Saturn system, the azure blue in the northern winter Saturnian hemisphere that greeted Cassini upon its arrival in 2004 is now fading; and it is now the southern hemisphere, in its approach to winter, that is taking on a bluish hue.
[B]ack here on Earth, the Cassini mission was recently given rave reviews by a panel of planetary scientists and NASA program managers for its contributions to our understanding of the solar system, a circumstance that bodes well for a well-funded continuing mission over the next 5 years. Despite the fact that we can't know exactly what the next five years will bring us, we can be certain that whatever it is will be wondrous.
Photo above: "A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color view of Titan and Saturn from NASA's Cassini spacecraft."
More beautiful images from Cassini here.
Hellooooo, new desktop. Read the rest
