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If your car is a diesel, it will run. Liquid hydrogen, the fuel that powered the space shuttle's main engines, could work, says Manuel Martinez-Sanchez, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But keeping hydrogen liquid requires maintaining it at a temperature below about –432°F. Storing it in a garage would be tricky, as would keeping it from freezing the engine. More »
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Every now and again the internet has the capacity to blow our dinky craniums to smithereens — this happens to be one of those moments. Some unplaceable Herculean conviction drove LEGO architect Ryan McNaught to build a 5.76-meter-tall recreation of the Saturn V rocket used for Apollo 11 out of 120,000 plastic bricks. More »
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Wow! Take a look at this for a little "bang! zoom!" in your day! This video shows an incredible video of an amateur rocket launch, which could be eligible for a $5,000 rocketry prize. More »
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Looks like there's hope yet for a future with affordable space flight: a recently-published report by NASA has confirmed that commercializing rocket design has the potential to dramatically cut costs in ways that could revolutionize the future of space transport. More »
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This beauty may look like the love child of a flying saucer and a disco ball, but is actually a key component of Europe's most powerful rocket launcher. More »
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For personal reasons, I had to miss yesterday's NASA press conference, which gave an update on International Space Station operations following the failure and crash of a Progress resupply vehicle last week. When I returned home and saw the headlines about the briefing from other news sites, I thought, "Wow, everyone is really overreacting about how this might affect the space station." More »
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Blowing up rockets in midflight is easy - as long as you've got a fast enough computer. More »
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In the early 1960s, some twenty-something enthusiasts in Lebanon started building remarkably sophisticated rockets. These rockets made it as far up as the International Space Station is today, and even the United States and Soviet Union had to pay attention. More »
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We've already seen last month's launch of the Discovery from the perspective of an airplane and a high-atmosphere balloon. Now check out this awe-inspiring 30-minute video captured from Discovery's twin solid rocket boosters. More »
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It's an awesome solution to a simple problem: you need ridiculous amounts of fuel to get a rocket into orbit. However, if the rocket fuel was considerably hotter, it would be more energetic, and you'd need way less fuel to launch the rocket. So why don't we just shoot powerful lasers at rockets? It's so insane that it just might work. More »
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Here's a fiery portrait of India's second failed launch of 2010. The GSAT-5P, launching a new geosynchronous communications satellite, broke up in the first stage and exploded. How did this happen? More »
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A rusty old cart sits in front of the Soyuz TMA-01M spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, just a few days before its launch to the International Space Station. (The Soyuz craft, not the cart.) [Carla Cioffi/NASA via Space.com] More »
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Once, these rocket ships helped countless schoolchildren to conquer the vast reaches of space. Now, they look like a good way to get tetanus, with their rusty distressed metal. Photographer Lauren Orchowski's new book Rocket Science documents their beautiful decrepitude. More »
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In this film, taken a couple of years ago from a rocket booster on the space shuttle Discovery, you can see what it's like to blast into space, shooting fire and whirling back into the upper atmosphere. More »
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Straight from the halls of the Moscow Aviation Institute, these images of looming machines and intricate wiring are sure to stir up a longing for retro Russian rocketry. [victorprofessor via English Russia] More »
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With a rocket ship about to land by the Bay, can Starfleet Headquarters be far behind? Help San Francisco build its first space port - and support the arts, too! More »
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That's not a happy rocket-launch picture. South Korea lost contact with its Naro-1 rocket right after launch, and the Koreans believe it exploded at 43 miles. The Koreans were attempting to launch a scientific satellite to cope with climate change. More »
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Remember those crazy spiral UFOs spotted over Norway last year? Now there's video of another one, this time over Australia. And the explanation for both phenomena is likely the same. More »
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Dreaming of a journey to the outer solar system? A group of physicists at Johns Hopkins have the same dream, and have published a report on what's required to send humans to Neptune. Hint: Lots of cash and magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters. More »
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Soviet space dogs had their mugs plastered on stamps, cigarettes, matchbooks, and other baubles. Here's ephemera featuring Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to survive a space flight, and Laika, the first animal to live (and sadly die) in orbit. More »
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Here's South Korea's first space rocket, the prosaically named Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1, whose scheduled launch was aborted today. If it ever launches, will the KSLV-1 establish South Korea as a space power, or create new tensions with North Korea? More »
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The days of high-tech metal mountings to hold spacecraft together are gone, according to the man designing Virgin Galactics' commercial spaceplanes. Apparently, all you need is glue. Knowing that, suddenly we're much more worried about flying in a Virgin ship. More »
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Check out this row of experimental astronaut suits — they look like something out of Tintin. With the 40th anniversary of the Moon landing coming up, the National Air and Space Museum is displaying precious Apollo mission artifacts. Gallery below. More »
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A specially designed rocket soars over Wallops Island, VA, on its way to test a new astronaut escape system for NASA's Orion spacecraft, due to start launching in 2015. Want to see the fancy new escape system? There are parachutes... More »
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What better way to impress your friends than to bring the sexy sleek lines of rocket ships right into your sink? Who needs gold plated tubs and jacuzzi jets when your faucet is this chic? More »
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It's amazing how sleek and old-school the Soyuz rocket looks, preparing to blast off from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome to the International Space Station. Especially surrounded by Soviet-looking guards. More Cosmodrome porn is below. More »
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This Japanese H-2A rocket blasted off on Friday with a payload of six satellites, including the Ibuki, whose sole purpose is to gather data on greenhouse gas emissions. More »
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Wernher von Braun may have been a bit mercenary in his political dealings, but his work in astronautics and rocket design was instrumental in putting American astronauts on the moon. Between 1952 and 1954, Collier’s magazine profiled von Braun’s work in the series “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” Next week, the materials von Braun created for this series will be auctioned off, including several sketches of his rocket designs. More »
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While the Large Hadron Collider is shut down for repairs, you might be feeling pessimistic about grand scientific experiments. But that's the cool thing about science - even when everything goes horribly wrong, we still learn something. Sometimes, what we learn from failure is more important than what we'd have gained from a success. Here are five scientific experiments that didn't go as planned, and we're all better off for them. More »
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Nothing like the smoking ruins left behind after a rocket smashes to Earth on a fast, steep reentry course. I love this set of images showing the results of the Russian Soyuz rocket's return to Earth in April of this year. Recently uncovered by Dark Roasted Blend, the images show the rocket's burning tear through a field of grain, and then close in on the blackened husk of the reentry cone itself. More »
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“This is the Atomic Pulse Rocket, a pot-bellied ship nearly the size of the Empire State Building, propelled by a series of atomic blasts.” Sure, it sounds like a bad idea now but back then it was on the cutting edge: it only needed “a thousand atomic blasts—each equal to 1,000 tons of TNT” to push the 75,000 ton behemoth out of Earth’s atmosphere. Once transit speed was reached, things went green: power was then provided by “solar batteries plating the wing and body surfaces.” More »
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Made of glass and recycled metals, these spaceships look like they were torn from the pages of rocket magazines in the 1930s. They're the battered but delicate stars of Rik Allen's show "Innersphere" at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, which runs through April 27. Allen, a master glass blower, said he wanted to pay homage to the science fiction he loved as a kid. Here are another two of his pieces, below. More »
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Back in the mid-twentieth century, a bunch of NASA engineers had a dream — a highly-classified dream — about taking a nuclear-powered rocked to Saturn. They even went so far as to plan the entire device, create design specs and concept art (some of it pictured here), and name it "Project Orion." Now science historian George Dyson has unearthed a bunch of the recently re-classified papers related to Project Orion, which his father Freeman Dyson was involved in, and put them together into a short, entertaining presentation. Essentially he's unearthed an alternate history of the space program that might have been if NASA hadn't canceled it. Check out his entertaining story below. More »
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Doesn't the Columbus space lab look cozy? Here it is in the clean room of the EADS Space Transportation complex in Bremen, Germany, getting ready to be blasted up to the International Space Station. And click through for a blazing shot of the Russian Soyuz-U rocket blasting off from the Baikonur cosmodrome yesterday, carrying supplies to the ISS. More »
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Why is there a rocket racing ahead of the space shuttle in this 1971 Tang ad? Maybe it's because the sleek-but-functional space shuttle concept art just doesn't look scifi enough on its own. Or maybe this is a symbolic baton-passing from the Apollo missions to the coming shuttle era. Either way, the space shuttle didn't look nearly this vivid and space-opera by the time it actually existed. Image by Wishbook. [Fanboy.com] More »
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Giant rockets fought in space yesterday when the Japanese military shot down a mid-range ballistic missile using this Standard Missile 3 (SM-3). The ballistic missile was zooming along 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean. Japan is the first US ally to attempt these kinds of space war moves, and they did it from a US Navy missile range off the coast of Kauai. Check out more fire and a Japanese military boat in photos after the jump. More »
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The Soyuz-FG launcher sticks to a 1950s snub-nosed aesthetic, even though it was built in 2001. The Soyuz is preparing to launch Dec. 14 from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome. Image by STR/AFP/Getty Images. More »
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What will it take to launch another space age to replace the one that ended with the Cold War? Maybe another space race. China is ramping up its efforts to put people back on the Moon, launch more lunar orbiters, and build its own space station. Already, China is challenging the U.S.' domination of space launches. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=322740&view=rss&microfeed=true Rockets may be a thing of the past one of these days. Instead, we may use huge electromagnetic "rail guns" to escape from the gravity of a body such as Earth or the Moon. But this concept hasn't appeared much in movies or TV yet. Hence this new short film (which is still in development, hence the unfinished test footage, just posted last night.) More »
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