space
10 pieces tagged “space”, newest first.
Profiles of Valor: CAPT Victor Glover (USN/NASA)
“In the military, there’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. There aren’t any on top of rockets, either.”
The Success of Artemis II
The second of several NASA missions was completed last Friday, offering hope for future space flights and, eventually, a (permanent) return to the moon.
Even Faith Is Bigger in Space
The crew members of the Artemis II mission to orbit the moon give glory to God for His incredible creation.
Artemis II — To the Moon!
On Wednesday, if the Florida weather cooperates, four astronauts will lift off on a journey considered the next step toward our return to the moon after more than 50 years.
Space: The Visionaries Take Over
Fractured and divided as we are, on one thing we can agree: 2015 was a miserable year. The only cheer was provided by Lincoln Chafee and the Pluto flyby (two separate phenomena), as well as one seminal aeronautical breakthrough. On Dec. 21, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, after launching 11 satellites into orbit, returned its 15-story booster rocket, upright and intact, to a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. That’s a $60 million mountain of machinery — recovered. (The traditional booster rocket either burns up or disappears into some ocean.)
America Visits Pluto
In 1989, America’s Voyager 2 spacecraft performed a reconnaissance flyby of Neptune, the distant ice giant planet that orbits about three billion miles from the sun. I was in graduate school then, and I stayed up all night watching PBS’s “Neptune All Night” broadcast of the images being sent from Voyager as it swept past Neptune and its retinue of moons. What a fascinating world this was! Neptune, a shimmering blue gem of a planet, had tremendously violent weather with 1,000-mph winds and huge, dark, brooding storms, something utterly unexpected for a planet so cold and so far from the sun. Alan Stern, a young scientist in 1989, knew we needed a mission to Pluto. He agitated for many years to fund a flyby of Pluto, and finally the New Horizons spacecraft was launched on a big Atlas V rocket, speeding away from the Earth at 35,000 mph.
Finding Our Place in the Universe
Twinkling stars are pretty but, for astronomers, problematic. Twinkles are caused by the interference of Earth’s atmosphere with light radiating throughout the breathtakingly beautiful and unimaginably violent universe. In 1990, however, the Hubble telescope went into orbit 370 miles above Earth, beyond the atmospheric filter, peering perhaps 12 billion years into the past, almost to the Big Bang of 13.7 billion years ago. It has seen interesting things, including HD 189733b, a planet about 63 light-years (370 trillion miles) away, where winds exceed 4,000 mph and it rains molten glass. As Hubble nears the end of its life, its much more capable successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, named after a former NASA administrator, is being developed at Johns Hopkins University.
Earth to Kepler-452b
NASA has discovered the answer to all of our problems. It is another planet, a possible twin to Earth that could theoretically sustain life. This revelation could be bigger than Columbus “discovering” America, or Lewis and Clark finding the Northwest Passage. It offers the possibility of starting over. Hasn’t the thought crossed the mind of every adult of a certain age that if we could time travel back to our youth and know what we know now, we would not have made the mistakes we made? The first step in boldly going where no one has gone before is to re-name the planet. Kepler-452b won’t do. How about Krypton? That name is already widely known as the fictional planet from which Superman came, thus giving it cultural standing. Steven Spielberg could make a film about our new second home. ET might even be there to welcome us.