rocket

Review: Rocket Music Player sounds and looks better than most music players

Rocket Music Player combines cool features with an attractive layout and fantastic audio quality. It's a near-perfect blend of style and substance. Since it gives you most of its great features for free, there's no question that you should try it.

This app is one of the rare apps that sounds better without headphones than it does with them. It sounds great even on mediocre speakers. It has some advanced audio-tweaking settings like limiters, fading, and gapless playback. There's an equalizer, but you need to pay $4 to unlock all of its features. You can only tweak … Read more

Students blast off in egg payload rocket contest

Big rockets like the SpaceX Grasshopper and the Orbital Antares have been in the news lately, but those are a little out of reach for the average student. That's why the Aerospace Industries Association's Team America Rocketry Challenge exists. It fans the maker flames by challenging kids to design, build, and launch model rockets.

The rocket challenge finals took place over the weekend. It was a record year for the competition's turnout, with 725 teams battling through the initial rounds. The top 100 teams participated in the final fly-off in Virginia, representing 29 states with teams from schools, 4-H clubs, and even a team made up of Civil Air Patrol volunteers.

The competition was open to students in grades 7 through 12. All the teams had one goal: build the best model rocket. The challenge was to fly an egg to 750 feet up in the air, and then parachute it back to the ground with no damage. That's even harder than it sounds.… Read more

SpaceX hovering Grasshopper rocket reaches new heights

Last month at SXSW, SpaceX founder Elon Musk showed off a video of the SpaceX Grasshopper rocket rising 24 stories into the air and returning safely back to the ground. For a vehicle that is 10 stories high, that's pretty good, but not enough to make your jaw drop.

This creation is called the Grasshopper Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) vehicle. It's so named because of its nifty parlor trick of being able to blast off vertically and then land upright. Now, the company has tripled the distance of the previous attempt and released a new video showing off the rocket's capabilities. … Read more

Elon Musk at SXSW: 'I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact'

AUSTIN, Texas -- SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk wowed a capacity SXSW crowd here today with the first public showing of a video of a rocket capable of blasting off and then returning safely and gently to the ground. And he later added he hopes to one day travel (perhaps one-way) to Mars.

The video of the company's Grasshopper rocket, filmed just about a day-and-a-half ago, demonstrates one of SpaceX's key propositions: That it can develop reusable rockets at a fraction of the cost of a traditional NASA mission, and that it can bring them back down … Read more

Grab and convert YouTube files and more with MP3 Rocket

YouTube hosts millions of free videos, including tons of tunes; so much that it's sometimes easier to download and save your favorites. You have many choices when it comes to free tools that can do the job. One of the best we've seen is MP3 Rocket, a tool that can search for, find, download, convert, and save video and music files from YouTube. It handles most video formats, including HD, and audio formats, too. It also shows online TV programming, plays 'Net radio, and even accesses lots of games.

MP3 Rocket's tabbed interface involves an integrated media … Read more

SpaceX rocket engine shut down at launch

Monday's CNET Update finds a few problems:

Although it appeared to be a flawless launch, there was a problem with one of the engines of the SpaceX Falcon 9. About a minute after takeoff, one of the engines detected a drop in pressure and shut down. Video posted on YouTube shows debris falling off in what some have called an explosion. SpaceX said the engine did not explode, but rather the protective fairing for the engine ruptured due to the pressure change. The other engines compensated for the failed engine, as was designed to happen if there was a … Read more

Divorced woman sends wedding ring into orbit

When relationships end, there isn't just one guilty party. Unless there is.

It might well be that your ex was a lovable person whom you treated like an errant musketeer. Or it might be that, one fine day, you discovered your ex's words were merely the arbitrary squeakings of a pygmy.

Rebecca Gibbs clearly became disenamored of her husband, Stephen Page. Where once their wedding proudly adorned YouTube, more recently the site reverberated with the whooshing sound of their marriage going up in smoke.

Or into space, to be more precise.

For Gibbs decided to take their wedding … Read more

How to learn Gmail keyboard shortcuts with KeyRocket

Most of us spend a large part of our day reading and writing e-mails. If you're a Hotmail (now Outlook.com), Yahoo! Mail, or Gmail user, you may already be familiar with using Webmail keyboard shortcuts. They can save you time by not having to constantly take your hands off of the keyboard to reach for a mouse. But how many of those shortcuts have you actually learned?

KeyRocket for Gmail is a Chrome extension that can help you learn Gmail keyboard shortcuts, while you're using Gmail. All you have to do is install the Chrome extension, make … Read more

Watch SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket test fire in advance of launch

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its attached Dragon spacecraft exhaled flames for a few seconds today at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

After pausing the first attempt at a test firing of the Falcon 9 due to a glitch just moments before the end of the countdown, SpaceX proceeded with a second attempt, which succeeded. The rocket remained stationary, but the system passed the "static fire" test with flying colors, putting Elon Musk's commercial space venture one step closer to reaching the International Space Station for the first time.

The test firing was the height … Read more