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The History of the Space Shuttle
From its first launch 30 years ago to its final launch scheduled for next Friday, NASA’s Space Shuttle program has seen moments of dizzying inspiration and of crushing disappointment. When next week’s launch is complete, the program will have sent up 135 missions, ferrying more than 350 humans and thousands of tons of material and equipment into low Earth orbit. Fourteen astronauts have lost their lives along the way — the missions have always been risky, the engineering complex, the hazards extreme. As we near the end of the program, I’d like to look back at the past few decades of shuttle development and missions as we await the next steps toward human space flight.
Above: Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off from Kennedy Space Center, on April 12, 1981. Commander John Young and pilot Robert Crippen were onboard STS-1, the first orbital flight of the Space Shuttle program. (Reuters/NASA/KSC)
See more excellent photos at In Focus
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The mystery of one of the most convincing pieces of UFO evidence has been solved.
(via huffingtonpost)
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Transit of Venus brings out skywatchers on seven continents for planet’s last-in-a-lifetime trip across the face of the sun
(Photos: SDO/NASA via Getty Images AFP/Getty Images) -
life:
Happy birthday, Stanley Kubrick.
To celebrate, LIFE.com offers a series of photos from the set of ‘2001’ — pictures that suggest the astonishing lengths to which Kubrick was willing to go to make his vision a reality.
Pictured: Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
See more photos here.
These are amazing.
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“Next week, while we’re all watching NBC, a nuclear-powered, MINI-Cooper-sized super rover will land on Mars. We accurately guided this monster from 200 million miles away (that’s 7.6 million marathons). It requires better accuracy than an Olympic golfer teeing off in London and hitting a hole-in-one in Auckland, New Zealand. It will use a laser to blast rocks, a chemical nose to sniff out the potential for life, and hundreds of other feats of near-magic. Will these discoveries lead us down a path to confirming life on other planets? Wouldn’t that be a good story that might make people care about science? But telling us this story means more than just the composition of the rocks (sorry, Mars geologists). It’s about the team that makes it happen.
No one producing an Olympic teaser asks, “What’s the importance of 100 meters?” No, they tell us about the athletes who dedicate their lives to running the race, because dedication and triumph are what make a human running 100 meters interesting. If NBC can get us all misty-eyed about 100 meters, imagine what NASA could do with 200 million miles.
The Mars race is about human survival and understanding our place in a vast and terrifyingly beautiful universe. And the stories of its athletes (mathletes?) should be world-class, because they accomplish near-impossible tasks on a cosmic scale — the hardest sport you could ever compete in. It requires dedication and doggedness that only the most passionate people in the universe could deliver. Unfortunately, this drama plays out behind closed doors. We won’t have insights into the sacrifice, scandal, discovery, divorce, hardship, and drama that it takes to work for a decade delivering a one-ton super rover to another planet. It’s the biggest irony that the most junior engineer at NASA is fearless in the face of trying to send a robot to Mars, but the career bureaucrats are afraid to tell that engineer’s story of failure or success.
NASA will say that they’re doing the best they can and stretching their education and outreach budgets to the max. But if they hope to stay in business, they need to tell us how they’re pushing the limits of humanity with over-the-top, risky-ass missions that will answer questions about who we are as a species on this planet.”Andrew Kessler, The Huffington Post. Why You Should Be More Interested in Mars Than the Olympics.
Kessler, who spent ninety days inside NASA to write Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission, believes the agency is “so frightened of failure that they’re willing to sacrifice their greatest asset: the ability to inspire.” In other words, they no longer tell a good story.
Know who could help? Kick ass science journalists.
Sidenote: AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards applications are due tomorrow.
(via futurejournalismproject)
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Breathtaking view of the Milky Way from the surface of Mars
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Forty-One New Exoplanets Discovered Using Transit Timing
the planets range from Earth-sized, to more than seven times the diameter of Earth. These new planets are generally too close to their parent star to support life as we know it. The 41 new planets in 20 star systems were discovered using Transit Timing Variations (TTV).
Credit: NASA JPL
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