Author: mwallis

The United States Air Force plans to launch its first robotic X-37B space plane Thursday on a mission that is a forerunner of things to come. A second mini-space plane is already under contract and is projected to be launched

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the machinations required to extend the Cassini probe for another 7 year mission at Saturn.

Apollo 13. Everyone knows the story. Damaged by an explosion on the way to the moon in 1970, the three astronauts and the folks at NASA pulled out every stop to get them home in their crippled spacecraft. Using the

Building anything can be a complicated task. Building big doesn’t always make it easier. Building big in space definitely makes it more complex. USAToday has a dandy flash presentation on the 10+ year construction effort to build the International Space

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has developed a highly efficient, environmentally friendly process that selectively converts gamma-valerolactone, a biomass derivative, into the chemical equivalent of jet fuel. The simple process preserves about 95 percent of the energy from

The final patch design for the Space Shuttle Program has been selected by a NASA committee from a pool of entries by NASA employees and contractors. It beat out 84 other prospective patches to be the final commemorative token of