ArchivesTag : Space
10 Best Innovations of 2011
Popular Science recently featured the 100 Best Innovations of the Year. Here are 10 of the most exciting and interesting ones. Recreation: Lifesaving Wetsuit The Billabong V1 is more than just a wetsuit. This suit inflates a bladder in the back of the suit once an attached ripcord is pulled, helping the wearer float in [...]
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Colonizing Space and Yesterday’s Dreams
I grew up on this stuff. In the 1970′s some at NASA believed it may be realistic to be building colonies in orbit of up to 10,000 people, by…about now. It may have been, had we really wanted to. The original dreams came from the work of Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, and his book High [...]
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Are you an alien – DNA building-blocks from space found in meteorites
NASA recently reported that scientists have identified nucleobases that make up our genetic code in meteorites and that it appears they were created in space. It has been theorized that life may have actually migrated to Earth rather than spontaneously appearing here, and this kind of discovery supports that possibility. Popular Science has a nice [...]
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Our Future in Space: Moving Offworld
Three milestones in space were passed in the last four days. The NASA spacecraft Dawn began its close approach to the second largest of the know asteroids in the asteroid belt, the asteroid Vesta. The final space shuttle mission ended with the landing of Atlantis this morning. And, yesterday marked the anniversary of the day [...]
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Space Tourism 2011
(Written with Catherine Otten) The space experience race is on. I have always wanted to go into space. It could happen sooner than we think. All I need is the money. According to the Space Tourism Society, billionaires such as Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson are spending hundreds of millions of dollars [...]
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Striking a Balance: The Yin and Yang of Futuring
This is a guest blog by Brenda Cooper. As long as I’ve been alive, humanity has obsessed over its demise – at its own hands. In second grade, stern teachers sent me crawling under desks to avoid nuclear war (talk about a culture of fear – today has nothing on the sixties). Now we are [...]
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SpaceX Falcon 9 Launch – success!
Update on previous post: The SpaceX company of Elon Musk launched its Falcon 9 into orbit for the first time today – this is one of the private spacecraft that NASA is counting on for future access to space. After one aborted launch attempt that shut down automatically when telemetry readings were not correct, a [...]
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SpaceX Launch of Falcon 9 today – watch it
The SpaceX company of Elon Musk is scheduled to launch its Falcon 9 for the first time today – this is one of the private spacecraft that NASA is counting on for future access to space. Live launch video feed is available right now. Watch if you can…
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Our Future In Space
I grew up in space. Not literally, obviously, but in my sense of future possibilities. When Colliers and other magazines in the 1950’s featured the Von Braun space station on their covers – the great wheel in space that became an iconic image – this locked in for me a life-long interest in space exploration. [...]
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Our Future in Space, after Apollo 40 Years Ago
Before this day, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon, is over, I want to recognize a person who played such a key role in that endeavor, Ed Lindaman, director of program planning for Apollo at Rockwell. The fact that Ed was the inspiration and mentor who led me to become [...]
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