Aerospace

It's the one space shuttle that never made the trip to space.

And now the shuttle Enterprise is making the journey to its final frontier, the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. It flew into JFK Airport from Washington Dulles this morning, not on its own power but latched atop NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.

NASA has made an event out of the short flight. The twinned aircraft flew at a low altitude over the New York metropolitan area and passed within photo-op range of landmarks including the Statue of Liberty. It has now landed … Read more

We've all driven down a road, looked away, looked back and mistaken a bear for the Abominable Snowman. Or a Toyota Prius for a car.

However, when you're in the air, slight errors of visual comprehension might be magnified.

For it seems that an Air Canada pilot, on his way from Toronto to Zurich, woke up from his scheduled nap and mistook Venus for an oncoming planet. Ah, no, that last "t" shouldn't be there. He thought it was a plane.

So, as CNN dives into it, he pressed the appropriate buttons and levers and … Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL -- The space shuttle Discovery, bolted to the back of a NASA 747 jumbo jet, departed the Kennedy Space Center for the last time today, putting on a final show for thousands of Space Coast residents and tourists who jammed area beaches just after sunrise for a low-altitude flyby.

"Oh my God," exclaimed Lynne Rover, who watched the shuttle pass overhead from a beach in Cape Canaveral. "I feel like part of America is dying. It really annoys me that we have to pay the Russians to bring our astronauts back and forth (… Read more

Along with the ICBM, it was one of the defining pieces of military technology during the Cold War: the B-52 bomber.

Those who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s knew the B-52 Stratofortress as a central figure in the anxiety that flowed from the protracted staring match between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. On the one hand, it was reassuring to know that the Strategic Air Command was ready at a moment's notice to scramble its B-52s to counter any potential nuclear attack. On the other hand, if the bombers were flying that mission, well, things … Read more

Airbus yesterday formally opened the assembly line of its next-generation A350 when it began final construction of the first test aircraft in Toulouse, France.

The center fuselage section, which arrived at the company's production facility in the belly of an A300-600T (aka the Beluga), can now be joined with the forward fuselage section already in place. Next to come will be the wings and aft fuselage, which are currently being built in plants in Germany and the United Kingdom

The first aircraft, MSN5000, will be used only for static testing on the ground. According to FlightBlogger's Jon Ostrower (… Read more

Well-heeled travelers tired of airport lines have some good news today from Terrafugia.

The maker of the Transition flying car said that a production prototype, the D2, made its first flight earlier in March, a step toward what it hopes will be commercial availability within the next year. Company engineers took the Transition for an eight-minute flight around Plattsburgh International Airport in Plattsburgh, N.Y.

The Transition is two-seat personal aircraft that is legal to drive on streets and highways and that runs, both in the air and on the road, on unleaded gasoline. The wings fold up to make … Read more

Astronomers are increasingly sure that Earth-like planets aren't so unique after all.

A multiyear study done by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) concludes there are tens of billions of rocky planets in potentially habitable zones in the Milky Way.

The analysis also found there are about 100 "super Earths," or planets with masses between one and 10 times that of Earth, orbiting stars that are relatively nearby. The astronomers define "neighboring" as about 30 light-years away.

ESO researchers used a technique for detecting the presence of planets around red dwarf stars, the most common type … Read more

When you are a man who has everything--and has had everything for some time--how many pleasures are left upon this planet?

It is, therefore, with a vast thrust of uplift that I report that Ashton Kutcher, he of CBS' "Two And A Half Men," a huge but fragile Twitter account, and a smile that floats many a romcom, is being taken into space.

Time magazine reports that Kutcher has become the 500th human being to sign up for a suborbital Virgin Galactic flight.

Virgin's Sir Richard Branson was so heartily chuffed by this increase in his revenue … Read more

MIT researchers are trying to get computers to correctly interpret hand signals used by crews aboard aircraft carriers so that robot planes can follow them.

As Northrop Grumman continues to develop its X-47B robot stealth plane, which is aimed at carrier use, Yale Song and colleagues at MIT are working on a machine learning system that could allow autonomous planes to understand crew directions.

In its research presented in the journal ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, the team used a database of abstract representations of 24 gestures often employed by carrier personnel. They trained an algorithm to classify gestures, including posture and hand position, based on what it knew from the database. … Read more