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Okay, the trip to see the Enterprise fly into New York is a go. I'm planning to get to Battery Park by 9:30 in the morning. I probably WON'T be online again between now and then, so if you're looking for me, you'll have to call me. I may walk up to Battery Park City for a view up and down the Hudson, and then back down to the park for the view with ( Read more... )

"Is Obama grounding JFK's space legacy?" is an editorial in today's USA Today by Apollo commanders Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, and Gene Cernan. It's a good piece, which I recommend to you ( Read more... )

I'm sitting here working, but on another screen, I'm listening to the NASA TV webcast of the final pre-launch preparations for Discovery's launch on STS-133. Scheduled launch time is 4:50PM EST (about one hour and ten minutes from now). Also have the launch blog open on another window.

Today is the beginning of NASA's week of horrible anniversaries. On 27 January 1967, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White, and Roger B. Chaffee died in a launch pad fire during an early test of the Apollo system, then known as Apollo/Saturn-204, and later renamed Apollo 1.

On 28 January 1986, 73 seconds after lift-off, the Space Shuttle ( Read more... )

Have I not been paying attention, or what? The X-37B unmanned space plane landed early this morning (see this article) after more than seven months in space, and I didn't even realize it was up there. For those of you, like me, who hadn't read much about it: it's pretty much a smaller version of the Space Shuttle, but unmanned, and with the solar ( Read more... )

NASA launched the new rocket, which they're planning to use as the next-generation manned launcher, on Wednesday. The Ares I-X flew well, doing what it was supposed to, and I just watched the video on NASA's web siteNow I'm trying to figure out why I'm not nearly so excited by this launch as I've been for nearly every other rocket launch I've known ( Read more... )

I'll catch up soon, I promise.

In the meantime comes this news: President Obama has chosen an astronaut as the next Administrator of NASA. Charles Bolden was a USMC General, and flew twice as Shuttle pilot, and twice as mission commander. Forget all the color of his skin nonsense: he'll be the first Administrator who's actually been up there. He ( Read more... )

It was a long trip, and I'll be back and updating soon. In the meantime, this link takes you to a great, rarely seen picture: two space shuttles on the launch pad at one time. Now look at that picture and think back to the very beginning of the shuttle program, when we thought these reusable craft would mean weekly flights into space: two or even ( Read more... )

More on that asteroid that hit the Earth late Monday night, New Scientist has this article. Still no picture of the flash as 2008 TC3 actually hit the atmosphere and burned up/exploded, but there is a link to a four-frame sequence from NASA that shows it moving against the background stars.