Thanks to Google I now know that today is Giovanni Schiaparelli's birthday. It is indirectly his fault that people thought Mars had canals. The real fault lies with people who can't translate from Italian, but if you can blame something on the Eye-ties, you ought to try.

This schedule seems a little ambitious, but it's exciting nonetheless. I'm kinda glad that the new Orion program is going back to good ol' rocketships. I've always felt a little cheated that the last Apollo missions were flown the month after I was born (nevermind the last Moon landing being 3 years earlier...) - I never got to see rocketships ( Read more... )

The space shuttle, Endeavor, blasted off last night. So I've been poking around the Intarwebs looking at space stuff this morning (wasting time before trying to catch up on my telecourse). On a list of current missions on NASA's website, I saw a link for Hayabusa, the Japanese space agency's sample-return mission to an asteroid. The most recent ( Read more... )