SpaceX’s Grasshopper “leaps” higher

Yesterday, The Verge posted a neat video of SpaceX’s Grasshopper flying higher than ever. According to the article, Grasshopper flew 744 meters high, hovered, then returned safely to the launch pad. If you look closely at the video, it looks like SpaceX is using a quadcopter UAV or some such thing to film the rocket […]

Government largesse, space exploration, and pants

This is another opinion piece, so just read on if you’re interested, or ignore it, click on your Amazon tab, and continue shopping. My encounter the other day with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) website being down (you can go here to see that–or just type in http://www.nasa.gov) due to the government shutdown […]

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 […]

Who will be the “ultimate space operator?”

Most people might agree the ultimate space operator is the astronaut (cosmonauts for those Russian fans). But according to this Slate article (posted today), the space operator will be robots. Fair enough. Satellites are a kind of robot, or at the very least, a drone. They have sensors, CPUs, power supplies, etc. Many things akin to […]

More of a good thing

AND THEY’RE OFF!! Now we have two US companies supplying the International Space Station with their own rockets and spacecraft. SpaceRef just posted this article about Orbital’s new rocket and its launch today. Go here for photos of the take-off. And to think we were concerned about a lack of US space launch capability earlier […]