Gentlemen, start your Lego jet engine. Created by Rolls-Royce and unveiled at the Farnborough International Airshow in England yesterday, the engine uses 152,455 bricks and reaches an overall size of 4.9 feet long and 6.5 feet wide. All of those Legos together stack up to an astounding 676 pounds. … Read more
If you were an American astronaut heading into space anytime in the last 50 years or so, chances are your trip started in Florida.
More specifically, that flight -- into Earth's orbit or to the moon, in a shuttle or in a capsule -- would have started at the Kennedy Space Center on the Atlantic coastline. That now sprawling facility has been at the heart of NASA's operations since the fledgling space agency took over what had been a missile firing laboratory as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s.
The facility didn't carry John Kennedy's … Read more
Sergey Brin stormed on the stage in his Google Glasses like Iron Man Tony Stark, prepared to give the crowd of 5,500 developers what he called an "awesome" display of technology and daredevil live action.
He gave the play-by-play as a troop of skydivers, bikers, and rope rappellers converged on the Moscone convention center, in a scene that could have been the opening sequence of a "Mission: Impossible" movie (if it wasn't part of Brin's Google I/O Glass demo).
The skydivers made jumping out of an airship look easy. But before … Read more
In just 41 days, on August 5, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover will touch down on the Red Planet, and this will be no ordinary landing. In fact, NASA has dubbed the descent "Seven Minutes of Terror."
"When people look at it, it looks crazy," senior EDL engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Adam Steltzner said in a new video by NASA on the rover landing. "It is the result of reasoned engineering thought, but it still looks crazy."
The recently released video (see below) outlines exactly how crazy the feat of landing … Read more
Capt. Francis Gary Powers, the Air Force pilot whose U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, was posthumously honored Friday in a medal ceremony at the Pentagon.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz presented the Silver Star Medal to Capt. Powers' children, Gary Powers Jr. and Dee Powers, in the Hall of Heroes, in tribute to Powers' "heroic action and his loyalty to the United States of America during a pivotal time in our nation's history."
"My sister, myself, my wife, my son, aunts and uncles, cousins, the … Read more
You can watch NASA's live feed:
You can watch CBSNews.com's live feed (Click here starting around 2:30 p.m. PT).
Or, watch it from the convenience of your smart phone via the Venus Transit app, available on Android and iOS. The app also lets you share your observations with other viewers.
If you want … Read more
The bulbous Phantom Eye UAV flew for less than a half-hour in its debut autonomous flight -- but that was just a bite-size test in preparation for eventually staying aloft for days at a time.
Boeing announced this morning that its Phantom Eye made a 28-minute flight at the end of last week, reaching an altitude of 4,080 feet and a cruising speed of 62 knots. The unmanned aircraft, which looks rather like a propane tank outfitted with wings and a tail structure, is powered by liquid hydrogen. Ground tests took place earlier this year.
Eventually, the Boeing-funded aircraft … Read more
Solar Impulse, a Swiss sun-powered aircraft, on Friday finished the first leg of its attempt at an intercontinental flight without using a single drop of fuel.
The solar plane took off Thursday from Payerne, Switzerland, bound for Morocco. It landed safely Friday on a planned three-day technical stopover in Madrid, where it will get a new pilot.
If successful, the 1,550-mile journey will be the longest to date for the craft, which last year completed its first international flight from its home in Switzerland to Brussels.
Pilot Andre Borschberg handled the first leg of the trip for the Solar … Read more
The payoff moment of the historic SpaceX mission to the International Space Station is upon us.
A robotic arm on the International Space Station has reached out and captured the SpaceX Dragon capsule at a distance of about 10 meters. Next up in this historic mission: docking with the space station.
The capture occurred at 9:56 a.m. ET / 6:56 a.m. PT. It had been expected to occur about an hour earlier, but the capsule held at the 30-meter point as the ISS crew made evaluations and adjustments.
Folks at SpaceX, founded by … Read more
We've written here a number of times about U.S. Air Force aircraft designed way back in the middle of the 20th century -- the B-52 bomber, the U-2 spy plane, the C-130 all-purpose airlift aircraft -- that are still pulling duty in this second decade of the 21st century.
But of course, the Pentagon does buy its share of new designs to keep pace with changing times and the demands of modern war-fighting. (Consider the saga of the multibajillion-dollar F-35 joint strike fighter.)
One of those newer-fangled aircraft destined to join the inventory in the not-too-distant future is … Read more
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