Aerospace

Today is May 5th, when modern Americans assuming this is the day of Mexican independence (it isn't) consume Mexican stuff like burritos and margaritas (those aren't Mexican) but what we should be celebrating is Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard going into space. On this day in 1961, 60 years ago, Alan Shepard let himself be strapped into a capsule sitting on top of a skyscraper of rocket fuel using parts all selected because they were the lowest bidder on a government contract - and set off for the unknown. Seriously, this was a risk only test pilots would happily have taken. If you look at the…

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile recently took a census of stellar eggs in the constellation Taurus and their evolution state in order to better understand how and when a stellar embryo transforms to a baby star deep inside a gaseous egg.  They also found a bipolar outflow, a pair of gas streams - that could be telltale evidence of a truly newborn star. Stars are formed by gravitational contraction of gaseous clouds. The densest parts of the clouds, molecular cloud cores, are the very sites of star formation and mainly located along the Milky Way. The…

The math used to analyze cyclic phenomena like the ebb and flow of ocean tides has been applied to Sol, the star we orbit. While it can't do anything to flatten its irregularities, or the impacts it has on communications, temperature, and weather, the "Sun clock" created by scholars shows it starts and stops on a much more precise schedule than can be discerned by observations plotted linearly over time. Solar cycles, the rhythmic waxing and waning of activity on the Sun, occur about every 11 years on average, but average means many periods are years shorter and longer. They also vary in…

Two NASA astronauts, Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, will make history by traveling to the International Space Station in a privately funded spacecraft, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. It will also be the first time astronauts have launched from US soil in nine years. The astronauts will take off lying on their backs in the seats, and facing in the direction of travel to reduce the stress of high acceleration on their bodies. Once launched from Kennedy Space Center, the spacecraft will travel out over the Atlantic, turning to travel in a direction that matches the ISS…

The U.S Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.) has had NASA on its High Risk list since 1990, due to persistent cost inflation and missed schedules of its programs. Long before banks and General Motors set out to become "too big to fail", NASA had made it a core value.  There is no better example of how far NASA has fallen from the can-do group that gave us the Apollo program than the James Webb Space Telescope fiasco. First proposed and funded in 1996 as the successor to Hubble, by 2002 they had told Congress that 11 years - longer than it took for the Apollo Program to put man on…

Viking 1, an unmanned U.S. probe headed for Mars, was launched on this day in 1975 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, which is Brevard county on the Atlantic Ocean and across the Banana River east of Merritt Island where Kennedy Space Center is which is itself east Titusville across the Indian River. Yet even though Viking 1 took off from Cape Canaveral, formerly called Cape Kennedy, it did not take off from its more famous adjacent site, Kennedy Space Center, formerly called NASA Launch Operations Center. It instead took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station headquartered at Patrick Air…

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is getting a lot of coverage, and it's well-deserved. It was a bold Cold War adventure, it cost a fortune,(1) and it succeeded. As a former Army officer during the Cold War it's hard to imagine anyone missing it,(2) but it was a necessary component. We never would have done it without a sense of paranoid purpose. There was no reason to do it outside geopolitics.(3)   But young people may not know all that, and those in media looking for an angle will revise it in a "Charlie Wilson's War" kind of way to pretend it matched their…

On this morning’s edition of AMHQ, The Weather Channel’s morning show, meteorologists Jim Cantore&Tevin Wooten gave viewers an in-depth look at what it would have been like to land on the moon - using The Weather Channel's’s proprietary Immersive Mixed Reality technology. You may have seen it in the past, during coverage of a flood, when they had everything from televisions to fish floating as their pundits exaggerated the effects of water rising. While the hyperbolic claims they made were ridiculous, they were no more ridiculous than what other media outlets did to grab viewers, and the…

Is it sacred land if it's two and a half miles in the air and only a few elites were allowed to visit on penalty of death for anyone else? It is, since 2014, according to a few locals mobilized by activists from the mainland who were more interested in blocking science than helping the local community - and have politicized astronomy, in the form of the Thirty Meter Telescope, in their war. To try and bolster their case, and engage in photo ops of government "desecrating" the land they built supposed sacred structures on the site. But they arrived very late and built them illegally. By the…

At the very large and very small levels, gravity does not really work the way it should. At the very large level, instead of contracting, the universe has both expanded and accelerated despite detectable forces that could cause it.  Measurements to determine how fast the Universe is expanding over time are known as the Hubble constant. It has been determined by a cosmic distance ladder, calculated by observing pulsating stars called Cepheid variables in a neighboring satellite galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud, 162,000 light-years away. When defining the distances to galaxies…