space

SpaceShipTwo fires rocket engine in supersonic flight

If you've got $200,000 to spend on a ticket to suborbital space, your spaceship is nearly ready.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, billed as the world's first commercial space plane, notched an important milestone today by firing its rocket engine during flight for the first time.

The test at Mojave Air and Space Port in California saw the passenger space plane detach from its dual-hull mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, at an altitude of 47,000 feet while being piloted by Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury of builder Scaled Composites.

The pair then ignited the rocket motor, which propelled the craft up to 55,000 feet. During the 16-second engine burn, SpaceShipTwo went supersonic, hitting Mach 1.2. … 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

California gets first commercial white-space high-speed Internet

Believe it or not, there are still parts of the U.S. that don't have access to high-speed Internet. But that's looking to change with the onset of TV white-space broadband technology.

The first commercial application of this type of service in the U.S. is coming to a rural area of Northern California called El Dorado County, or Gold Country. Internet provider Cal.net is partnering with network equipment provider Carlson to bring this region's residents something more than dial-up.

"Over 59,000 residents in our rural service area have had little or no quality … Read more

CrashPlan for Mac 3.5.2 Review

Finding outside storage to back up computer files is critical in the event of a technical problem. CrashPlan for Mac is a well-designed program and cloud service that performs its function as a data storage application.

CrashPlan for Mac is available as a free application, but the cloud backup service is free for 30 days. After that time, users must sign up for a subscription service based on the amount of storage needed and the number of computers they'd like to run the app on. The program's native installer quickly set up the program. The program's main … Read more

Orbital's Antares rocket makes successful test flight

After multiple scrubbed launches last week, an Antares rocket finally lifted off the ground from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia as part of Orbital Sciences' bid to transport cargo to the International Space Station.

The rocket lifted off at 5 p.m. ET Sunday and achieved orbit smoothly. It launched an 8,400-pound mock Cygnus supply ship into orbit about 158 miles above Earth.

Antares is a medium-class, two-stage, 13-storey rocket designed to carry payloads of up to 6,500 kg (14,329 pounds). Along with SpaceX, Orbital was awarded a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract to … Read more

Crave Ep. 117: Escape from Earth to three newly discovered hospitable planets

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NASA's Kepler space telescope has discovered new habitable planets, but don't pack up your house just yet. Plus, we take a first look at Fujitsu's FingerLink touch-based projection scanner, and Project Unity lets you play up to 18 classic video consoles in one box. … Read more

Wringing out a space station washcloth makes water clingy

Thanks to astronaut Chris Hadfield and a series of videos from the Canadian Space Agency, we've had incredible access to all aspects of life on the International Space Station. Activities that are so mundane here on Earth (like clipping nails and heating up some spinach) become things of wonder in zero gravity. That's why we're all going ga-ga over Hadfield wringing out a washcloth.

If I told you nearly 600,000 people would tune into YouTube to watch a piece of cloth get wrung out, you would probably laugh and tell me to take the day off. Fortunately, we're not all suffering from a mass delusion. Hadfield soaking up a washcloth with water and then wringing it out really is that cool.… Read more

NASA has found 3 nice, habitable planets for us to choose from

NASA, that wily band of intergalactic peepers, says it's spied three distant planets in two different solar systems that are the proper distance from their suns to make them potentially habitable.

I can almost hear Elon Musk's pitch for time-shares in the Kepler-62 and Kepler-69 systems already.… Read more

NASA experimenting with 3D printing for space exploration

NASA is getting into the 3D printing business. At NASA's Ames Research Center, engineers and researchers are experimenting with the technology with the hope that one day their creations will be used in space exploration. "Space Shop is our attempt to take the best practices and lessons learned from what we call the maker community," said Dave Korsmeyer, the director of engineering at NASA Ames.

The program is still in its nascent stages. But NASA sees potential in the technology because it enables designers and engineers to get the manufacturing information early in the design process and … Read more