SpaceX

By USA Science & Engineering Festival Nifty Fifty and X-STEM Speaker Dr. Jeff Goldstein Note: The launch of the CRS-5 is set for 6:20 am ET, January 6, on SpaceX-5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, adjacent to Kennedy Space Center, Florida. I thought it would be important to put up a blog post on the October 28, 2014, loss of Orb-3 and the SSEP Mission 6 Yankee Clipper payload of experiments, something that could capture the experience in that moment. I think it is an important story to share with the thousands of SSEP students across the nation and in Canada who are invested in this…
By Dr. Adrian Brown Planetary Research Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute The last two months have witnessed several extremely important events with respect to future Mars Exploration. The first two revolved around the rover "Spirit." The other two are a new mission to Mars and a possible road for humans to Mars. "Spirit" On June 3rd, the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) team published a stunning paper describing how the rover "Spirit," now immobile in the shifting sands of Gusev Crater, detected carbonate minerals in a rock called "Comanche…
Last November, in Florida, I had the opportunity to see my first Space Shuttle launch. For the hundreds of millions of people who don't pay more than a passing notice to the fact that human beings still go into space on a regular basis, this is a fairly banal thing. But to those who camp out all day, plan trips around Cape Canaveral launch windows, and scrupulously follow the ins and outs of NASA politics, this is the bread and butter. Unless you score tickets to the Kennedy Space Center, which has the official ambiance and a giant countdown clock, the best place to watch a NASA Shuttle…