Boeing's X-51A WaveRider Scramjet has had its share of bad luck. While its first test flight in 2010 went fine, the two that followed ended with unsatisfactory plops. Now, the USAF has just completed the fourth and final test, and the result was a screaming 370 seconds of scramjet glory and literally hypersonic…

Skylon, in development by the British company Reaction Engines, would be the Holy-Grail-meets-cold-fusion of space travel, a single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane powered by the Sabre engine, which is both a jet and a rocket. While typical Skylon spaceports still belong to a hazy future, a recent test of the Sabre engine…

This is a very neat graphic: all modern American rockets and spaceships compared, from XCOR's Lynx—a two-seat space transport vehicle—to NASA's next-generation Space Launch System. And of course, the classic Saturn V added for good measure.

When it comes to wild-ass ’50s dreams about mankind’s imminent future in space, it’s tough to beat Freeman Dyson’s nuke-powered Project Orion, but this concept drawing of a rocket monorail is not half bad either. A rocket monorail!

Russian blogger and photographer Lana Sator has taken urban exploring to its rather frightening apogee when she sneaked inside the NPO Energomash factory, which makes liquid-propellant rocket engines near the Khimki Forest outside Moscow, and made her way to the top and the bottom of the abandoned-looking facility.

It's like the Sons of Anarchy and Evel Knievel conceived a kinky lovechild while jumping over the Grand Canyon aboard rocket sleds.

First, Iran elects a president whose sense of style begins and ends at Members Only jackets. Then, some operative tries to hire a washed-out used car dealer to assassinate a Saudi Arabian ambassador in the United States. And now Iran's attempt to put a monkey in space failed.

Libyan rebels continue a tenuous back-and-forth with Qaddafi's forces, bolstered by the occasional NATO fist from the sky. And it's a good thing they've got the ol' Treaty Organization behind them, because the insurrection's a bit... ragtag.

With severe drought gripping much of central China this winter, authorities there didn't just sit back and let Mother Nature scrimp on the rain. They blasted it out of the sky, with thousands of rockets launched from pickup trucks.

This is an illustration from physics professor Peter Alway's 1995 book Rockets of the World. That little black-and-yellow smudge in the second row, that's the V–2. Hit the jump for mega-size.