spaceflight

"Yes, now there is this technological path. But it's just starting." -Mae Jemison Earlier this month, Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking teamed up to announce the Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million investment in technology that would build a laser array to propel a thin, light "laser sail" spacecraft to approximately 20% the speed of light. If we can achieve these speeds and sufficiently aim these sails at the nearest star systems, we'll arrive at our destinations within a single human lifetime. Illustration of an exoplanetary system. Image credit: NASA/David Hardy, via astroart.org. But…

"Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings." -Yuri Milner In one of the boldest initiatives ever announced, billionaire Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking are working on developing a "Breakthrough Starshot" project, where an advanced laser array will power a sail-driven spacecraft to speeds exceeding 60,000 km/s, taking it to the nearest stars within a single human lifetime. A…

"Greatness is not in were we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it - but sail we must. And not drift, nor lie at anchor." –Oliver Wendell Holmes It's long been a dream of humanity to travel interplanetary distances at great speeds, or to make it to another star system within a human lifetime. Until recently, technologies to get us there -- antimatter propulsion, wormholes or warp drive -- have all been composed of physically unrealistic solutions. But recent developments in laser technology make directed energy propulsion a…

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." -Gus Grissom On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was performing a "plugs-out" test of the Command/Service Module, an essential simulation of how the three-person capsule would perform under in-space conditions under its own power. At 6:30 PM, a voltage spike occurred, leading to a disaster. In 26 seconds, everything changed. Image credit: NASA, of the aftermath of the Apollo 1 fire. The Apollo 1…

"Oh, yes — I know you. There was a time you looked at the stars and dreamed of what might be." -Star Trek: Nemesis, spoken by Jean-Luc Picard The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly. Image credit: NASA, 1981. A remote camera captures a close-up view of a Space Shuttle Main…

“I wasn’t destined to be an astronaut. I had to turn myself into one.” -Chris Hadfield Many of us dream of becoming astronauts as a child, but give up on that dream for a number of reasons — the seemingly impossible odds, the demands of daily life, the rigors of preparation — and never even apply. But for a great many, that dream remains alive; the last time NASA had open applications, over 6,000 people threw their hat in the ring, with eight selected. Image credit: NASA; Photographer: Robert Markowitz. NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, at lectern in the middle of the frame, speaks at a…

"It's almost like I feel I'm just moving there, and I'm not coming back." -Scott Kelly On his 233rd day in space, ISS astronaut Scott Kelly took a photo that's since gone viral of the Earth at night, showing a number of cities in India and a star field above the planet's atmosphere and airglow. Image credit: ISS astronaut Scott Kelly, via https://twitter.com/StationCDRKelly/status/666042034633883649/photo/1?r…. But in the upper right of the photo, a Star Destroyer-esque light looms. As I explain, however, this is simply light reflecting off of the ISS's HDEV module, nothing more complex or…

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -Richard Feynman Every few months now, the popular press goes wild with claims that there’s a new engine out there, one that produces thrust without any exhaust, violating the fundamental law of conservation of momentum. Image credit: NASA Spaceflight forums, via Chris Bergin. While science is, fundamentally, an experimental endeavor, this is far, far more likely to be a case of our own, human failings than it is a case of revolutionary new physics. There are distinct patterns…

“Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.” -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 It's arguable that we never came closer to leaving Earth than we did in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the only humans in history ventured beyond low Earth orbit as part of the Apollo program. Have a listen…

“Well, this is a thing unheard of. An Elf would go underground, where a Dwarf dare not. Oh, I’d never hear the end of it.” -Gimli, Lord of the Rings When you think about the different elements present here on Earth, I hope you think about the different ways they bind together, combine, and add value to all we do. Extracting them is a great difficulty, as Uncle Tupelo will sing to you in their song, Coalminers. Image credit: Theodore Gray, via http://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Posters/index.posters.html. For each pure element, there's an abundance in our Solar System that's relatively…

“I remember as a kid having a balloon and accidentally letting the string go and watching it just float off and into the sky until it disappeared. And there’s something about that, even, that feels very much like what life is, you know, that it’s fleeting, and it’s temporal.” -Pete Docter So, you want to colonize another world, do you? Want to send humans to go live somewhere new, on a habitable planet beyond Earth? Well you're not alone. But which planet will you choose? Will it be Mars, a smaller, colder, farther-out world than our own? Where perhaps you add a magnetic field, a thicker…

“Lost — yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.” -Horace Mann The beauty of a sunset (or sunrise) is rare and unique, happening but once a day for those of us on Earth. But aboard a spacecraft like the ISS, these are sights that happen sixteen times a day. Image credit: NASA / Karen Nyberg / ISS Expedition 36/37. And while we're used to dramatic, slow sunsets where it takes between two and three minutes simply for the Sun's disk to drop below the horizon, it takes mere seconds…

“Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.” –Ronald Reagan Three years ago, Sally Ride -- the first American woman in space -- died of pancreatic cancer. This past week would have been her 64th birthday; she left us far too soon. It's easy, when we look back on her life, to consider what she accomplished, the barriers she broke, and who she was as a person and as a professional. Image credit: Newsweek magazine. But there's a legacy she left behind that's…

“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.” -Tennessee Williams The depiction of dying in space -- by exposure to its terrifying vacuum -- is incredibly varied, from freezing to swelling and bulging to simply exploding. Image credit: Mike Tyson Mysteries / Adult Swim. Uh oh, looks like I killed another astronaut! For this week's Ask Ethan, we take on the question of Kerrie Pinkney, who wants to know: [W]ill you explode if exposed to the vacuum of space? I’ve gone down the “water boils in a vacuum then freezes” road, others have gone down the “…

“Even in hindsight, I would not change one whit of the Voyager experience. Dreams and sweat carried it off. But most of all, its legacy makes us all Earth travelers among the stars.” -Charley Kohlhase It's a taxing enough task to launch something off the surface of the Earth, escaping our planet's gravity and finding our way into interplanetary space. Image credit: Delta II rocket launch, public domain, via http://www.gps.gov/. But to reach the outer Solar System? To go beyond the gas giants and even escape from our Sun's pull completely? We need a little help to do that. Thankfully, the…

“This Administration has never really faced up to where we are going in space… As a result, NASA is both drifting and lobbying for bigger things — without being able to focus realistically on what it should be doing.” -White House staff assistant Clay Thomas Whitehead, February 1971 What should we be doing with respect to our space program? At its peak -- the mid-1960s -- the US government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today? Image credit: OMB Historical Budget Tables. That number is down to 3%, the lowest it's…

If you wanted to travel to the stars -- and by that, I mean star systems beyond our own -- you'd better be prepared to take your sweet time. Even at the speeds the Apollo astronauts traveled to the Moon, it would take millions of years to reach even the next nearest star beyond our own, Proxima Centauri. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, via http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1343a/. And yet, General Relativity admits an astounding possibility to short-cut the great cosmic distances by punching a hole in spacetime, connecting two far-separated events to one another through a…

“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” -Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut When you think about the most amazing sights available to humanity here on Earth, you probably don't think about leaving Earth in order to capture them. But sometimes, doing exactly that can give you an otherworldly perspective that adds a beauty that you'd never be able to experience otherwise. Image credit: Cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and the Russian Space Agency Press Services. But the best collections of photos that capture this weren't taken by an…

“You can’t cheat an honest man. Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.” -W.C. Fields Well, it was bound to happen. A bad science story -- a story of illegitimate science with all the right buzzwords -- has gone viral. By now, you, too, have probable heard about the "impossible" space engine that's been validated by NASA and could take us to Mars: the EmDrive. Image credit: SPR, Ltd. But did it really work? Could it work? Or is this another hallmark example of the worst in not only science reporting, but in bad science itself? Image credit: “Registration by Photography of…

“Geologists have a saying: rocks remember.” -Neil Armstrong 45 years ago, the Apollo 11 mission was on its way away from planet Earth and headed towards the Moon, where the first human beings would set foot on the surface just a few days later. Image credit: NASA / Apollo 11, photo by Neil Armstrong. Back in 2012, the very first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, left this world for good. But the impact he had, and what he left behind, are worth remembering, even for those of us who weren't yet alive to remember it firsthand. Image credit: NASA. This is the official NASA / Apollo 11 mission…