Sometimes it’s good to have a bulge–in space!

A few smart folks have found that the Earth’s bulge is beneficial to satellites orbiting it. In this article, they explain why a perfectly spherical Earth would’ve been bad for a lot of satellites, resulting in plenty of satellite carnage (satellites falling from orbit more quickly). But it turns out that our spinning, bulgy planet […]

Mysterious Island, part deux

Not to be outdone by Astrium’s pictures mentioned in my aside a few days ago, RapidEye’s in the game, too. Some of their five imagery satellites have been very busy. They have released a few pictures of their own of the island that mysteriously rose from the water off of Pakistan’s coast. The island itself doesn’t […]

Pictures of the Dragon

Sorry about that last quick post. I normally don’t monitor launches. But here’s some more information about SpaceX’s Dragon from Yahoo! News. Remember, this one has the newer engines which a lot of established players (Air Force, Lockheed, etc.) were worried about. Of course SpaceX did test these as best they could, but the real […]

SpaceX Dragon Launching now

In just a few minutes–here.

If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who you gonna call?

Pleiades, of course–at least according to this news release from Astrium. An island appeared off of Pakistan’s coast a few days ago right after an earthquake, according to this ABC posting. There were all sorts of strange things associated with it, which are detailed in the article. Not quite strange in a Jules Verne kind […]