By Eric Berger Brian Greene, a highly regarded theoretical physicist and popular science communicator, will be giving a lecture on Saturday at Texas A&M University as part of its Physics Festival, and will also participate in a performance of Icarus, a tale set in outer space about a boy who challenges the awesome Read Full…
By Eric Berger This afternoon at 2:42 p.m. CT NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will launch toward the International Space Station. Watch below: Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream It’s the beginning of a nearly year-long mission in space for Kelly, the first American to spend that long in orbit. The goal is to Read Full…
By Eric Berger NASA outlined some of the details of its Asteroid Redirect Mission on Wednesday afternoon. The space agency will launch a robotic spacecraft in 2020 to visit an asteroid far away from Earth, likely 2008 EV5, grab a rock up to 13 feet across from its surface, and return to a Read Full…
By Eric Berger Before he left for Russia and his year-long mission to the International Space Station, Scott Kelly made a striking comment about his last time there, in 2010: “Even If I had hated the last six months, I would have done it all again for that last 20 minutes in the Read Full…
By Eric Berger A lot of the new space companies with the most buzz have dotcom billionaire backers — places like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Stratolaunch. Not so much XCOR, which is building a spacecraft to take people to the edge of space. It began with four people around a kitchen table in Read Full…
By Eric Berger As NASA’s administrator Charles Bolden is nothing if not affable. The former Marine fighter pilot and four-time astronaut, an appointee of President Obama, has taken a lot of heat from Congress and the public. Some of it he’s deserved and some (like that whole Muslim thing) he probably hasn’t. For Read Full…
By Eric Berger Tonight NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore will land, with two Russian colleagues, in the frigid wastelands of Kazakhstan. I had the good fortune to travel to Kazakhstan six months ago to see his launch, which I wrote about in Adrift Five. For a reporter this was an intimate experience unlike covering Read Full…
By Eric Berger Last fall, as his two young daughters looked on from a barren steppe in Kazakhstan, Butch Wilmore launched into space. The All-American Navy fighter pilot, a former college linebacker who likes nothing more than taking his kids to the dollar movies in Clear Lake, is understandably ready to come home Read Full…
By Eric Berger Since its discovery two centuries ago Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, has been little more than a blip of light. About a decade ago, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we finally got a better look at Ceres. There’s lots of mysteries on the 600-mile world begging Read Full…
By Eric Berger Tom Hardwick is peering into the eyes of of 2,500-year-old coffin. Although that may seem old, by Egyptian standards it’s not. When this coffin was buried in the desert the pyramids had already been built for 2,000 years. In Pharaonic times people followed elaborate funereal rituals. The dead were wrapped Read Full…