Free Republic

For several days last week, workers dismantled the 75-foot Confederate statue that has stood on the state Capitol grounds for 125 years. Monday, as crews removed the base to finish the job, they unearthed a time capsule of sorts underneath the rubble. The capsule was placed there when the monument was erected in 1894, said Michele Walker, public information officer for the N.C. Department of Cultural and Resources, in an interview with The News & Observer. Gov. Roy Cooper ordered the statue’s removal, along with the removal of two other Confederate monuments on Capitol grounds. The governor cited public safety...

According to Florida Today, large plumes of smoke were seen emanating from the area, indicating something had gone wrong. There were no injuries caused by the anomaly, which is now under control, according to officials with the 45th Space Wing based at the Air Force station. SpaceX plans to use its Crew Dragon capsule to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The capsule successfully flew for the first time in March. During the uncrewed mission, the spacecraft docked itself with the space station and then returned to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. That first...

SpaceX will be unveiling their manned version of the SpaceX Dragon tonight. The Dragon V2 has been designed to transport live human cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS), making it the second craft to taxi men and women to the station since the retirement of NASA's shuttle program in 2011. The Dragon Version 2 (V2) is a manned rendition of the SpaceX Dragon cargo capsules, which have been delivering supplies to the ISS since 2012. According to reports, the third unmanned Dragon cargo flight launched in April and returned to Earth earlier this month as part of...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran says it has sent the country's first space capsule that is able to sustain life into orbit as a test for a future mission that may carry a live animal. The state IRNA news agency says the capsule was carried by a rocket dubbed Kavoshgar-4 - or Explorer-4 in Farsi - some 75 miles (120 kilometers) into orbit. The launch of the capsule is a part of Iran's ambitious space program. Thursday's report provides no other details about the "life capsule" but said it was launched on Tuesday. Last year, Iran sent its first domestically...

John McCain's Imprisonment in Vietnam: A True Tale of Heroism James Ray Have you ever heard the whole account of John McCain's imprisonment during the Vietnam War? Until recently, I was only aware of the general story; I didn't know the details. But I recently read a couple of pieces on McCain's capture, imprisonment and torture by the North Vietnamese, and it blew me away. Not since Ernest Shackleton's cursed journey to the South Pole have I heard a tale of such courage, mental toughness and physical endurance. The Young John McCain The Crash and Capture In October of 1967,...

ARKALYK, Kazakhstan - The capsule carrying the world's first female space tourist touched down Friday on the Kazakh steppe after a bone-jarring journey from the international space station. Anousheh Ansari, Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and U.S. astronaut Jeffrey Williams had left the station aboard a cramped Russian Soyuz capsule about three hours earlier. After the capsule entered the Earth's atmosphere, search and rescue teams in three planes and 12 helicopters tracked the trajectory and scrambled to help the crew out of the craft. Officials monitoring the landing from Russia's Mission Control outside Moscow applauded after confirming that the capsule had...

LOS ANGELES - When a NASA capsule hauling comet and interstellar dust plummets through the Earth's atmosphere this weekend, residents in large sweeps of the West will witness a cosmic spectacle. During the Stardust capsule's blazing re-entry at 1:57 a.m. PST Sunday, it will travel at 29,000 mph, making it the fastest man-made object to return to Earth. The 100-pound cargo will arc over Northern California toward Utah's Dugway Proving Ground, a remote Army base southwest of Salt Lake City. Residents in parts of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada and Utah should see the Stardust capsule as it streaks...

Scientists Pick Up Pieces of Space Capsule 1 hour, 47 minutes ago By PAUL FOY, Associated Press Writer DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah - Scientists with tweezers picked through the twisted wreckage of a space capsule that crash-landed on Earth, hoping that microscopic clues to the evolution of the solar system weren't completely lost in Utah's salt flats. NASA engineers were stunned Wednesday when neither parachute deployed aboard the Genesis capsule and the craft plummeted to the ground at 193 mph, breaking open like a clamshell and exposing its collection of solar atoms to contamination. "There was a big pit in...

SALT LAKE CITY - The Genesis space capsule carrying solar wind particles will be plucked from nearly a mile above the Utah desert by stunt helicopter pilots who've replicated the retrieval, without fumbles, in nearly a dozen practice runs. "It's very exciting to be a civilian helicopter pilot and have the opportunity to work with NASA (news - web sites)," said Dan Rudert, a stunt pilot from Santa Ana, Calif., who rated the difficulty of the maneuver at an 8 or 9 on a scale to 10. Rudert spoke Thursday during a briefing with scientists on NASA television. The other...

ISS appears normal after capsule leak January 13 2004 at 04:06PM By Reuters By Sonia Oxley Moscow - Air pressure has stabilised aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after astronauts found a tiny hole that probably caused the ISS to fall for three weeks, Russian and United States space officials said on Tuesday. The orbital platform had been slowly losing pressure since December 22. On Monday, astronauts removed a hose in the window of a US onboard laboratory, which was the likely source of the leak. "My understanding is that the air pressure levels have stabilised," Jim Newman, director of...

'Ice Age time capsule' unearthed in America September 22 2003 at 06:15AM Springfield, Missouri - Paleontologist Matt Forir expected to find another 15m trash-filled pit when he went to investigate a cave unearthed by construction workers in southwest Missouri. He could not have been more wrong. The dynamite that blasted into limestone for a new road in Greene County unveiled proof that 630kg short-faced bears roamed the Ozarks during the Ice Age, and they struggled with arthritis and gout. Forir and other researchers are also investigating the possibility that herds of peccary - piglike animals - sought shelter in caves...

NASA has seen the future, and it is the space capsule. Seven months after the Columbia debacle the agency is giving serious consideration to bringing back a new version of the Apollo capsule, the expendable spacecraft that served the U.S. space program during its glory days in the 1960s through the mid-1970s. Supporters say they are not retreating into the past so much as waking up, at last, to the dangers of attempting spaceflight with winged shuttles, a notion given ample support by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's report released last week. Boosters on Capital Hill, in the aerospace industry...