Aerospace

It's not every day that you land a spacecraft on Mars, even if you're NASA. And in the case of the Curiosity rover, hurtling toward a Mars landing as Sunday night turns into Monday morning, the space agency is tempting fate with a novel approach that involves a big parachute, a specially designed winch, and some very high hopes.

The rover's descent through the Martian atmosphere, which NASA has dubbed the "Seven Minutes of Terror," will be an edge-of-your-seat experience, despite the space agency's excruciating preparations.

Consider, for instance, just one key element that … Read more

The U.S. Air Force says it is it has identified the cause of potentially deadly oxygen deprivation problems experienced by pilots flying the F-22 Raptor fighter jet for years.

A faulty valve in pressure suits worn by pilots at high altitudes caused more than a dozen pilots since 2008 to experience dizziness, disorientation, and even blackouts, Pentagon spokesperson George Little told reporters today.

"I think we have very high confidence that we've identified the issues," Little said, according to an ABC News account of the news conference, before announcing the suspension of flight restrictions put in … Read more

Several months after its high-profile fly-by of the New York City skyline, the Space Shuttle Enterprise has landed on display at a New York exhibit presented by the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. The show finally opened to the public today.

The Enterprise has found its final home on the USS Intrepid. For now, it's housed in a temporary pavilion; the museum is planning a more permanent structure in the future.

The space shuttle was unveiled as part of Samsung's SpaceFest week at the museum, which also included the "launch" of the company's newest product, the 75-inch ES9000 television.… Read more

I would no more pilot a plane than I would wear a lampshade on my head to dinner.

This remarkable -- and, as it turns out -- very instructive footage is a case for my defense.

It was posted to YouTube by Larry Hockensmith, who takes full responsibility for everything that happens in it.

This includes his sailplane's wing crashing into someone's mailbox.

I am grateful to Gadling.com for directing me to this beautiful and very slightly disturbing footage, which, I suspect, may not disturb regular pilots at all -- or even regular people with mailboxes.

Hockensmith'… Read more

All this week in the pouring British rain, people in suits have been gathering at a biennial trade show in Farnborough, England, to ogle the latest aircraft -- and sometimes buy a few. There's plenty on display for aviation geeks to get excited about, such as the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, but I was mainly there to take a look at the tech that BAE Systems is hawking out to its mostly military customers.

The main attraction was the first public showing of a plane that flies itself -- a 1983 Jetstream once used by a Scottish distillery that's … Read more

Gentlemen, start your Lego jet engine. Created by Rolls-Royce and unveiled at the Farnborough International Airshow in England yesterday, the engine uses 152,455 bricks and reaches an overall size of 4.9 feet long and 6.5 feet wide. All of those Legos together stack up to an astounding 676 pounds. … Read more

If you were an American astronaut heading into space anytime in the last 50 years or so, chances are your trip started in Florida.

More specifically, that flight -- into Earth's orbit or to the moon, in a shuttle or in a capsule -- would have started at the Kennedy Space Center on the Atlantic coastline. That now sprawling facility has been at the heart of NASA's operations since the fledgling space agency took over what had been a missile firing laboratory as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s.

The facility didn't carry John Kennedy's … Read more

Sergey Brin stormed on the stage in his Google Glasses like Iron Man Tony Stark, prepared to give the crowd of 5,500 developers what he called an "awesome" display of technology and daredevil live action.

He gave the play-by-play as a troop of skydivers, bikers, and rope rappellers converged on the Moscone convention center, in a scene that could have been the opening sequence of a "Mission: Impossible" movie (if it wasn't part of Brin's Google I/O Glass demo). 

The skydivers made jumping out of an airship look easy. But before … Read more

In just 41 days, on August 5, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover will touch down on the Red Planet, and this will be no ordinary landing. In fact, NASA has dubbed the descent "Seven Minutes of Terror."

"When people look at it, it looks crazy," senior EDL engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Adam Steltzner said in a new video by NASA on the rover landing. "It is the result of reasoned engineering thought, but it still looks crazy."

The recently released video (see below) outlines exactly how crazy the feat of landing … Read more