Category: Space
Stephen Hawking gets cast in a bronze statue
One of the greatest living scientists, Professor Steven Hawking, is to be depicted in a bronze statue sited near his office in Cambridge. The sculptor, 32-year-old Brightonian Eve Shepherd, has been following Hawking around to learn more about his personality…
The Chinese are building an "impossible" space drive
There’s a school of thought in Science, not widely subscribed to, that says “if it looks impossible, keep trying to do it until it works”. That’s the attitude China are taking towards perpetual motion, and they reckon they’ve cracked it. It’s an electromagnetic drive, which converts electromagnetic energy into thrust via microwaves. That’s a picture of it, up there.
Japan set to cross another invention off Arthur C. Clarke's list – sets aside £5bn for "space elevator"
A mere 30 years after Arthur C. Clarke first mooted the idea of running super-thin, lightweight cables into space and tethering them to a satellite in his book The Fountains of Paradise, Japanese scientists reckon they’re ready to bring all the parts together and make it happen.
For a relatively low in space travel terms bill of £5bn, the boffins think they’re close to solving the carbon nanotube technology issue that could make the existence of 22,000 mile-long cables possible. That amount of rope or even Ethernet cable…
"Norton, we have a problem": Virus on-board the ISS
The following is probably quite a scary sentence if you’re several miles up and outside the Earth’s atmosphere: “A computer virus has made it’s way on to the International Space Station”. That’s right – up in space, where no one can hear you scream and where there are no rescue missions, there’s a virus threatening to wreak havoc…
NASA celebrates its 50th Anniversary in style – with a Flash-based website.
NASA is celebrating it's 50th Anniversary with a party.
Not a crazy, balls-out, scientists running around getting naked and drunk kind of party. No. What they're having is a balls-out, online, multimedia, Flash-animated, interactive website kind of party. Rock on!
Actually, they are gonna have a real party (a 'gala', no less) later in the year ('balls-out', as yet unknown), but they really have launched an interactive, online, what-i-said-above website to celebrate, and it's really quite good. I've been playing with it for over an hour now, and it's endlessly fascinating. It really is!
I mean, I'm a sucker for pictorial versions of anything. I hate sitting down with a sheet of text and having to read it all, so an interactive, online, thingamy-what-i-said-above is a great fun way for NASA to really communicate (especially to the kids) what exactly it is they've been doing for the past 50 years.
Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium identifies heavenly bodies (in the sky)
I love the night sky, but beyond “The Plough” and Venus, I get a bit stuck trying to identify the various planets, stars, and constellations, so the SkyScout Personal Planetarium sounds like a great little gadget…
Slave Leia looked on proudly as Admiral Ackbar walked down the aisle
It’s a Star Wars wedding. Not just a a cake grandma made that, from the right angle, looks a bit like a 2D Death Star, but a proper, CAN YOU BELIEVE THEY DID THAT? Star Wars wedding. Everyone put in some effort.
Here’s a small celebratory montage we’ve put together of the finest photos. The highlight is the ginger man who grew his beard out to be Chewbacca, plus the grey-haired man who used his natural assets to do a superb Ben Kenobi. The X-Wings let the side down a bit, mind. What’s with the socks?
The entire set is, incredibly, viewable by the general public over on Flickr. We wanted to poke fun, but… it’s sensational…
Blow me up Scotty: James Doohan's ashes scattered with Falcon 1
You may have already read about SpaceX’s failure to get their privately funded rocketship Falcon 1 into space on Saturday night, but just what you may have missed is the news that stowed onboard the doomed rocket-ship, ready for delivery to space, were three commercial satellites and the cremated remains of 200 people.
Of those 200 urns of ashes blown into mile-high confetti, one happened to contain the remains of everyone’s favourite Scottish Star Trek engineer: Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (actor James Doohan)…
NASA briefing the White House on secret Mars news. HG Wells' fear of Mars may be vindicated.
A couple of weeks ago the sixth man on the moon, Edgar Mitchell, in an apparent bid to catch up with James Watson in the “man of science inexplicably becomes a crackpot” stakes, went on the radio and claimed that the human race has made contact with aliens and there’s a big cover-up to disguise this fact.
Maybe he’s not mad after all if Aviation Week, a publication not usually known for its hyperbole (or generally not known) is right with its story about NASA deliberately sitting on a huge announcement?
AMFE – A Message From Earth: Bebo users to hassle aliens with terrible music and bad gags
To be fair to the Bebo group by the name of A Message From Earth (AMFE), who are about to beam cultural data out into space, their content might actually be quite be good. The question remains though as to whether their intended alienlife targets will actually enjoy it or understand it at all.
The idea is that the group will send 500 multimedia messages, via Alexander Zaitsev and his radio telescope in the Ukraine, out into the black void, directed towards a planet by the name of Gliese 581c and any possible inhabitants. With its distance from a red sun and the likelihood of water, it has the right kind of conditions to support life such as ours…
