So DARPA wants a reusable spaceplane. I mean, who doesn't? For decades, space experts have tried to design quick-turnover, reusable launch systems. So far, however, no one has made one that works. "There really isn't any kind of vehicle today that does exactly what they're asking people to do," Micah Walter-Range, director of research and analysis at the Space Foundation, tells Popular Science. "You can certainly compare it to existing vehicles, but it seems to be a new class."
America's space shuttles may be settling into their retirement roles as national artifacts, but for space fans who miss their presence at Kennedy Space Center, Google has a new offering - Street View images of the entire complex, shuttles and all. The web giant unveiled the new images this morning, and we have a preview.
We've covered Blue Origin, the semi-mysterious space company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, in the past, but we never knew all that much about what they were working on. But they recently showed off their new space vehicle, which has completed wind tunnel testing and is named, in a fit of wild creativity, the "Space Vehicle," and a little bit of their plans for the future.
Upon examining a piece of Attic pottery, certain words may come to mind: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - and some would have you believe that is all you need to know here on Earth. But in space, you need to know a bit more. Like "how did this thing last so long?" Understanding how a Grecian urn survives for 2,500 years could yield improved ceramics - not for leaf-fringed scenes of deities or mortals, but for the sake of heat shields, and therefore safer astronauts.
