Later this year, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) is scheduled to launch on an exploratory and scientific mission for NASA, with support by the University of Colorado Boulder. As part of the spacecraft’s mission, it will act as the first spacecraft to focus primarily on the state of the upper atmosphere, the […]
The idea of harvesting resources from asteroids long predates space travel, and NASA is now taking the first steps toward bringing those celestial bodies down to Earth. Plans are being made for an entirely robotic spaceship able to haul a typical nearby asteroid, about 25 feet long and 500 tons, to a position near the […]
Richard Garriott’s Father, Owen, was an astronaut. The neighbors on either side of his childhood home, Joe Engle and Hoot Gibson, were astronauts. “Going to space,” Garriott said at SXSW on Monday, “seemed like something everybody just did.” Garriott has since made millions developing video games (famously inserting himself into the Ultima series of role-playing […]
Raucous applause greeted guests of the 100 Year Starship panel at SXSW as they took the stage. It seems little introduction was necessary for this crowd to heap praise upon the panel, but the moderator Benjamin Palmer (of the interactive marketing firm The Barbarian Group) introduced the panelists anyway as: Dr. Mae Jemison (astronaut, first […]
Ariel Waldman thinks that no matter how much you know about space, you can learn a thing or two more. And she’s right. Waldman has made her mark as an interaction designer and also as a research affiliate at the Institute For The Future, a group with the lofty goal to “turn foresight into the critical […]
From March 8 to 10 at South by Southwest, NASA will exhibit a full scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the space angency’s latest project and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The gargantuan piece of equipment is a sight to behold standing over four stories tall and weighing a total of […]
SXSW has arrived in Austin, TX, which is unusually chilly this time of year. The festival’s big gaping maw has barely begun to open to swallow up the tens of thousands of people who show up each year to discover and celebrate the seemingly infinite amount of creative endeavors put on display. And to network. […]
Never has liking a post on Tumblr or retweeting someone felt so profound. Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield, presently floating through space on the ISS as the flight engineer, has taken it upon himself to take jaw-dropping pictures of the Earth from space and then post those pictures on Tumblr. There is an astronaut currently in […]
Looking out across the Atlantic Ocean from the shore of Cape Canaveral, as far as the eye could see, the sky was gray with low clouds and a light rainfall pattering across the choppy waves. It had been raining the morning of November 14, 1969 and mission control at Kennedy Space Center in Florida had […]
Science Fiction author Dani Kollin (The Unincorporated Man and associated sequels) managed to snag an amazing shot of one of the decommissioned Space Shuttles. Kollin was kind enough to allow us to share both his image and his thoughts here. Tho there were thousands of people, I somehow got this angle of the Space Shuttle, […]
