Three weeks ago, a Russian and American crew was streaking towards the International Space Station in a Russian-built Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan. It would’ve normally barely been a blip on the news. The Soyuz is widely known to be extremely reliable. But something went wrong, and the crew had to abort and make an…
There’s something about going to space that just awakens a sense of possibility. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to feel that regarding a NASA mission to Mars, but on Saturday morning, the InSight spacecraft launched from California for a six month journey to the red planet.
The biggest obstacle for supersonic passenger jets, apart from the cost, is the massively loud and very annoying sonic boom that these ultra-fast planes create as they blast over the landscape. Since the death of the Concorde, endless proposals have been offered over the years with no result. Here’s NASA’s new…
A draft of the Trump administration’s next budget proposal reportedly suggests the U.S. is planning to end support for the International Space Station by 2025. That’s a terrible idea.
If there’s one building at NASA’s Johnson Space Center that houses all of the eye candy, it has to be Building 9. Robots! Vehicles! Life-size models! Builds in progress! There’s something new you’d want to explore, drive around or tinker with around every corner. It’s almost too much cool stuff to process all at once.
Drew Feustel is a true Jalop if there ever was one. He grew up in the Detroit area, where he worked as an auto mechanic in college. He’s had an enviable list of cars over the years and nearly went into car design himself, but ended up using his mechanical and science background for something more incredible: becoming…
The 25 Hours of Thunderhill is one of America’s longest, craziest grassroots road races, attracting crazy fast club racing cars ranging from Spec Miatas and Porsche Cayman GT4 Clubsports to full-on racing prototypes. Oh, and there’s a Studebaker Champion out there sharing a track with Norma prototypes, and it’s…
Sonoma Raceway may have escaped harm from the recent wildfires in the area, but drivers at Thunderhill Raceway Park found out just how bad the fire risk is in California this weekend. A racer at the National Auto Sport Association’s Western States Championships went off the pavement, sparking a grass fire that lasted…
Back in the 1970s, AM General—American Motors Corporation’s renaming of Kaiser Jeep’s “Defense and Government Products Division”—built an electric mail carrier Jeep called the DJ-5E “Electruck.” It was so advanced, NASA conducted a bunch of research on it, even referring to the Jeep as “state-of-the-art.”
Hurricane Maria was the most devastating hurricane to make land in Puerto Rico in nearly 100 years and the country is still reeling in its wake. Much of the island still doesn’t have running water, reliable communication or electricity.
Yesterday, the big joke involved a picture of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, full-palm touching an Orion spacecraft part that was clearly labeled “DO NOT TOUCH.” It’s a hilarious image, but what exactly is that untouchable thing, and what does it mean that Pence pawed it? I am here with…
Things got a lot more exciting in the Earth-moon neighborhood late last week, as Yang Liwei, the first Chinese person in space and now deputy director general of China Manned Space Agency, announced that “preliminary preparations” had already started for a Chinese crewed moon landing. The landing is planned to take…
As the Curiosity rover crawls its way across the Martian surface, it has to deal with a team of over 20 people to decide its every move. That makes riding in the car with an annoying navigator seem like a luxury.
Anyone who has ever navigated a government website knows that most of them are, for lack of a better word, utter shit. They are janky and disorganized. But NASA, in an effort to do away with that, just pulled all of its incredible images and videos together in one place. Get ready to lose hours of your life gazing at…
I have a friend who is unusually good at salvaging crap. Just this weekend he found, in an abandoned house, a perfect rear bumper (and brackets!) for my Beetle. That’s amazing enough, but he also found a set of NASA documents from the 1970s. Surprisingly, one of those volumes had, of all things, some fascinating…
It looks like 2016's unquenchable thirst for the blood of great people has struck again, as the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, has died at the age of 95.
Mars has been the vague next big goal of NASA’s manned space exploration since the 1970s, but a real, concrete commitment never quite seemed to happen. Until now. A bipartisan bill passed yesterday in Congress authorizes a new $19.5 billion budget for NASA, and an official mandate to send a crewed mission to mars…
The Air Force’s new F-22 Raptor is known for being super complicated and super expensive. That’s probably why the Air Force called up NASA for help last week when it heard that Hurricane Hermine was headed towards Virginia, where thirteen of its F-22s were hanging out at Langley Air Force Base.
Today we saw the first trailer for Hidden Figures, the film about the black women who were so instrumental in America’s space program, and you should read more about these unbelievably righteous women and the
“human computer” project that started it all.
If you were to stand on the floor of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and tilt your head up, this is the view that would greet you.
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