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Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center Chantilly, Virginia 9:59 A.M. EDT THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you, Dr. Stofan. Thank you for that kind introduction. And thank you for your tremendous stewardship and your tremendous leadership. Would you join me in thanking Dr. Ellen Stofan for her outstanding leadership? (Applause.) To all of the members of the National Space Council, to our User Advisory Group — all of whom very quietly came onstage — I think they all deserve a big round of applause. These are extraordinary Americans that are making a difference for American leadership in space. (Applause.) Would you join...

On August 13, 2019, NASA at the Trident Basin in Cape Canaveral, Florida, astronauts Doug Hurley, left, and Bob Behnken work with teams from NASA and SpaceX to rehearse crew extraction from SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which will be used to carry humans to the International Space Station. Using the ship Go Searcher to recover their spacecraft after splashdown and a mock-up of the Crew Dragon, the teams worked through the steps necessary to get Hurley and Behnken safely out of the Dragon. The pair will fly to the space station aboard the Crew Dragon for the SpaceX Demo-2 mission.

— Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, tweeted that a "big rock" is going to hit Earth, and that we "currently have no defense." But NASA, seems to disagree. Musk's tweet was a response to another by comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, who shared an article reporting that NASA has begun preparations for the 1,100-foot-wide asteroid Apophis, which is scheduled to pass by Earth on April 13, 2029. Apophis named after an Egyptian god of death. Musk isn't wrong when he tweeted "Wouldn't worry about this particular one," though. Apophis is going to miss us by 19,000 miles. It's...

 You’ve seen billowy cumulus clouds and wispy cirrus clouds, but odds are you’re not too familiar with fire clouds. Even scientists know less than what they'd like to about so-called pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) clouds, which form when wildfires and agricultural fires unleash enough heat and moisture into the atmosphere to produce storms.That changed on Aug. 8, when NASA’s airliner-turned-flying laboratory took to the skies over Washington state and flew a team of scientists straight into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that had formed high over a wildfire in the eastern part of the state.MORE AT LINK

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of NASA's Apollo 11 astronauts landing on the moon, the space agency has a very big piece of history it's looking to offload. The historic Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Alabama played a central role in developing the Saturn rockets that powered the Apollo rocket program, and apparently it had one of the earliest models just lying around after all these years. According to documents and emails obtained by CNET, MSFC "has excessed a Saturn 1 Block 1 Booster portion of a Saturn rocket stack up."

While the CRS stalwarts of Cygnus and Dragon are regular visitors to the ISS, Program Manager Kirk Shireman cited the need for “dissimilar redundancy” in adding Dream Chaser to the mix – a key selling point previously used by SNC during Dream Chaser’s crew transportation aspirations. The only blot on her report card was a landing gear failure during a 2013 landing test at the Dryden Flight Research Facility in California. The test was designed to verify and validate Dream Chaser’s low-atmosphere aerodynamics, flight control surfaces, flight characteristics for approach, flare and landing, and landing systems. However, as it approached...

"One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," stated Astronaut Neil Armstrong, JULY 20, 1969, as he became the f irst man to walk on the moon, almost 238,900 miles away from the Earth. The second man on the moon was Colonel Buzz Aldrin. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent a total of 21 hours and 37 minutes on the moon's surface before redocking their lunar module Eagle with the command ship Columbia, which was orbiting 57 miles above the Moon's surface. Buzz Aldrin earned a Ph.D. from M.I.T. and helped develop the technology necessary for the...

Think of the X-37B as the Space Shuttle’s smaller, younger brother and you wouldn’t be wrong. With its bullet-like shape, stubby wings, and two tone black and white appearance, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle looks like a smaller, cuter version of the manned orbiter that served NASA for decades. That’s where the comparison ends though: property of the U.S. Air Force, the secretive, unmanned X-37B is built to spend months in orbit, carrying out classified missions on behalf of America’s military space program.

NASA has not confirmed why one of their craft was in the area, but online viewers have now spotted that its flight path appeared to show it zig-zagging over the infamous San Andreas Fault. Renowned conspiracy theorist Tyler Glockner… “A registered NASA aircraft was noticed doing zig-zag flying patterns near and over the San Andreas fault line,” he said.” “It’s almost as if it is scanning the ground as if to try and get more data about what is happening underneath. Tyler wasn’t the only person to have linked the sighting of the NASA craft to the Fault. News conspiracy...

Bill Whittle, one of the most eloquent of conservative voices to be found, is also a pilot and an aviation enthusiast. On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Bill Whittle has hosted a four part series on the Apollo program titled "What We Saw". There are four hour-long episodes: Apollo 11: What We Saw: Part 1 - We Choose to Go to the Moon Apollo 11: What We Saw: Part 2 - The Clock is Running and We're Underway! What We Saw: Apollo 11: Part 3: In the Beginning... Apollo 11: What We Saw - Part 4:...

When Neil Armstrong died in a Cincinnati hospital two weeks after undergoing heart surgery in 2012, his family released a touching tribute addressing the astronaut’s millions of admirers around the globe. “Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty,” they wrote, telling fans of the first man to walk on the moon that “the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.” But in private, the family’s reaction to his death at 82 was far stormier. His two sons contended that incompetent...

The large DC-8, painted white with a blue stripe and the NASA logo on the tail, was spotted flying over Altadena at the height of afternoon rush hour in the San Gabriel Valley. “It was scary, a little bit. You didn’t know if was going to land,” she said. “Everyone kind of stopped in their cars, looking up. It was big and loud.” NASA did not respond to calls to find out why the plane was flying so low. The plane evidently flew 2,359 miles out of Palmdale that included a meandering path into Central California, across Nevada and landed...

A trio of researchers at the University of California has found evidence that suggests there is far more ice on the surface of the moon than has been thought. In their paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience, Lior Rubanenko, Jaahnavee Venkatraman and David Paige describe their study of similarities between ice on Mercury and shadowed regions on the moon and what they found. Prior researchers using data from the Arecibo Observatory and also NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft found that there are cratered areas on Mercury's poles that appear shadowed from Earth. Data from the LRO probe that was intentionally crashed...

Watching the Moon landing 50 years ago from his comfortable Paris home, Yves Beon could barely contain himself at the spectacle unfolding on TV. Dozens of white-shirted scientists and engineers at the Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, were on their feet, many waving flags, cheering at a triumph that was enhancing American prestige and unleashing an ocean of apple-pie patriotism. Yet Beon, a hero of the French Resistance, was spitting venom at the screen that night and, had he been alive to see last week’s documentaries repeating the footage of Neil Armstrong’s ‘giant leap for mankind’, his reaction...

This Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people in history to walk on the Moon. But it’s also the anniversary of the a lesser known event—the first celebration of the Lord’s Supper on the Moon. Here’s are nine things you should know about the first communion service on the Moon. 1. In 1969, Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. was an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church, a congregation just outside of Houston, Texas. He told the lead pastor of his church, Dean Woodruff, that he had “been...

In all, the lunar junkyard holds nearly 200 tonnes of human objects. The dusty remains of five Saturn V rocket stages from the Apollo missions are the heaviest single items. Then there are the wreckages of spacecraft that smashed, or were crashed intentionally at the end of their missions, into the lunar surface. James Irwin, an Apollo 15 astronaut, left a bible on the dashboard of his mission’s buggy. The least charming are 96 bags for poo, urine and vomit The crew of Apollo 15 carried an 8.5cm-tall aluminium figure to the moon. Created by the Belgian artist Paul Van...

Spalding continued, “When you look at America today, we have no telecommunication equipment manufacturers left that are American companies. When China entered the WTO in 2001, from that time period to 2017, we lost 78,000 factories. We unemployed 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. In the same time, we spent trillions in the Middle East.” “We fell into this trap of believing that open markets lead to wealth, and wealth leads to democracy, and, therefore, if we just open ourselves up to the world, that the world would automatically democratize,” noted Spalding. “In the space of that 20 years, we essentially deindustrialized...

Normally, I try to steer clear of putting opinion pieces into the first person, but the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing is enormously personal for me.  I was the kid in 5th Grade who dressed as Neil Armstrong in order to give a presentation of my report on Armstrong as one of the great “explorers” in world history.And I find it interesting that like the trashing of the legacy of those other great explorers by today’s progressives, the singular event of man’s achievement of landing on the moon is not spared the smearing of the world’s left....

A new film, Hidden Figures, tells the story of the maths wizards who Nasa relied on. When John Glenn was waiting to be fired into orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962, there was one person he trusted with the complex trajectory calculations required to bring him down safely from his orbital spaceflight: Katherine Johnson, an African-American mathematician who worked in Nasa’s segregated west area computers division. “Get the girl, check the numbers,” Glenn said before boarding the rocket. “If she says they’re good, I’m good to go.” Johnson was one of three female African-American mathematicians known as the “computers in...

As America prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, The New York Times is busy celebrating the Soviet space program and bashing America’s. A Times op-ed Thursday highlighted how the Soviet Union was oh-so-diverse, sending women and people of color into space long before stuffy, old America got around to doing the same. As the USSR retreats into the rearview mirror of history, there is a growing tendency to romanticize its disastrous reign through the lens of contemporary wokeness. Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags —...