TAG RESULTS FOR: space travel

Space race historian David Portree outlines the choices astronauts stranded in lunar orbit would have faced. Spoiler Alert: none of them are very good. Continue reading

NASA has a little treat for all of us robot and/or space junkies out there. From 8 a.m. PT (11 a.m. ET) every morning, Monday-Friday, work begins at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, as engineers carefully assemble the Curiosity Mars Rover. And you can watch them do it live with NASA’s Curiosity Cam. Other than occasional “maintenance periods” (obviously just the points of the assembly where the engineers attach the technology given to us by aliens), you can... Continue reading

Meet our two new national heroes. You might even have a pair of heroes living under your own roof. Luke Geissbuhler and his son (not the heroes) took an iPhone and an HD video camera (there they are!), enclosed in a Styrofoam block attached to a specially-designed weather balloon, and launched the devices 19 miles into the sky. As the balloon lurched beyond the Earth’s atmosphere the iPhone kept a GPS record of the balloon’s trail, the HD camcorder captured... Continue reading

Google’s Lunar X competition is still alive and kicking. The mission? Land a robot on the moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images and data back to the Earth. Teams must be at least 90% privately funded. The winner wins $30 million. The Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association team (ARCA) is hard at work on their promising Rockoon, a rocket-balloon which recently reached heights of 4okm which happens to be the highest altitude reached by a... Continue reading

The process of space travel, from brainstorming to landing, is possible through a mere system of steps. While the number of steps needed to plan a successful mission might rank in the hundreds of millions, it is all performed very methodically and precisely. Such care is needed when you’re dealing with gadgets and machinery that costs well into the billions of dollars. Even if the transportation of a robotic astronaut might sound like a simple enough task for a team... Continue reading

It has been 40 years today since Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, effectively becoming the first human being ever to set foot on a space mass other than Earth. Almost half a century later, the first step is still awe-inspiring. Thank you for providing the inspiration needed to launch MTV.