Free Republic

NASA's InSight lander arrived in November 2018 and started listening for Mars' heartbeat, we learnt something really remarkable: Mars is rumbling. To date, InSight has detected hundreds of marsquakes – enough to give us a detailed map of the Martian interior. Tkalčić and his colleague, geophysicist Weijia Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wanted to look for quakes that might have gone unnoticed in the InSight data. They used two unconventional techniques, only recently applied to geophysics, to hunt seismic events in the InSight data. Based on nine templates of known marsquakes, the pair detected 47 new seismic events,...

In the movie "Wonder Woman," the heroine has a choice to make. To save the world or not.

Southern California gun parts and accessory dealer Ares Armor continues to inform customers and supporters as to the status of its operations following yesterday’s raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Ares Chief Operations Officer Jeremy Tuma posted an update Saturday evening to his Instagram account where he first posted the news yesterday afternoon that “ATF is currently executing search warrants on all of our locations.” “We will be burning the midnight oil to assure we are fully operational by morning and that business goes on as uninterrupted as possible,” Tuma stated in last night’s message. Per...

According to Darpa “ARES is a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) flight module designed to operate as an unmanned platform capable of transporting a variety of payloads. The ARES VTOL flight module is designed to have its own power system, fuel, digital flight controls and remote command-and-control interfaces. Twin tilting ducted fans will provide efficient hovering and landing capabilities in a compact configuration, with rapid conversion to high-speed cruise flight.” ARES is the transformer-like, UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) capable to move between an airport, a warship, or an improvised landing zone and the battlefield, and perform a wide variety of...

The House bill awaiting action would give twice as much money to Russia for transporting astronauts and cargo to the space station as it would give to U.S. companies working to build that capacity.

NASA is pushing ahead with work on its new Orion space capsule and Ares rockets despite their ambiguous status as lawmakers discuss the agency's 2011 budget request.  Orion and Ares are part of Constellation, a NASA program designed to take astronauts back to the moon. Under his 2011 budget proposal, President Barack Obama called for canceling Constellation and urged NASA to work toward sending humans to an asteroid and then on to Mars. The outlook for Constellation's fledgling rocket and capsule spacecraft is not clear. Obama did recommend continuing development of Orion -- but only as an escape ship that...

The so-called “Great Debate” at the National Space Society’s (NSS) International Space and Development Conference (ISDC) in Chicago on Saturday afternoon featuring Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin and former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart was something of a dud, in part because it wasn’t that much of a debate: after ten-minute opening statements by Zubrin (who opposes the agency’s proposed plans) and Schweickart (who supports them), the floor was turned over to the audience, some of whom asked questions of the two, and others who simply expressed their opinions. Conference organizers explained that the event wasn’t intended to be a debate...

During World War II in the Pacific, many native tribes were astounded by their first contact with an advanced technological civilization, when the Americans would come in, clear a strip in the jungle, set up a control tower and loud giant silver birds would appear from the sky bearing canned food, trinkets, fuel and other supplies. After the war, the Americans went away for the most part, but the memories remained. Many of the natives, changed forever by the experience, decided to replicate it. They cleared their own strips, built control towers of thatch and palm, and waited for the...

HUNTSVILLE, AL - Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle is also sounding off about the president's plans for Constellation. Mayor Battle mailed a two-page letter addressed to President Barack Obama telling him to keep the Constellation program on schedule. Mayor Battle walked into a room with confidence to speak to the media. In his hand, was a two-page letter written to the attention President Obama. The mayor takes issue with the president's proposal to cut NASA's Constellation program. "This is not just about Huntsville. This is about the United States of America having a space program that goes forward," said Mayor Battle....

After 30 days of data reduction, Ares I-X engineers continue to find fairly close correlation between their computer models and the flight performance of the test vehicle, which was the tallest rocket ever launched. Flight-control algorithms developed for the operational vehicle "worked extremely well," said NASA's Marshall Smith, systems engineering and integration (SE&I) manager for Ares I-X, and the flight data in general validated the computer models being used to design Ares I. "I, personally, from SE&I, am very, very pleased with the performance of our (guidance, navigation and control) system; the algorithms that we're testing for Ares I worked...

- Names Ares "Invention of the Year" Based on Launch of Dummy Vehicle Citing Time magazine's selection of NASA's proposed Ares rockets "The Best Invention of the Year" based on a single purported "test flight" of the vehicle on October 28th, the Space Frontier Foundation congratulated NASA on its propaganda triumph. The Foundation pointed out that the rocket launched by NASA was not an Ares 1 at all, but a dummy vehicle cobbled together from pieces of other space systems, an elaborate mock-up shaped and painted to look like the actual vehicle, which isn't even scheduled to fly for another...

<p>Wonder at the impressive technological prowess of the genius engineers at NASA, as brave Ares launches. Be amazed at the sheer beauty of the mighty rocket as it it breaks the sound barrier, thundering the skies of this glorious nation.</p> <p>OK, so it looks like a flying condom.</p>

Well lets try it again..

Ares I-X is (hopefully) about to come out of its 20 minute hold. Launch is predicted to take place around 08:30 (or later).

In the wake of the Augustine Commission's declaration that the troubled Ares rocket program is unaffordable under any realistic budget projections, the Space Frontier Foundation renewed its call to immediately cancel the costly dead-end project and replace it with multiple commercial vehicles. "Three years ago we published Unaffordable and Unsustainable, declaring that government must henceforth 'buy all crew and cargo services with a destination of low Earth orbit [from] commercial providers using privately-owned and operated spaceships'," said Foundation co-Founder Bob Werb. "For over a decade, we've said that continuing to try and develop new government rockets costs too much and...

CAPE CANAVERAL — The aerospace giants contracted to help build NASA's next-generation spaceships are quietly hedging their bets and stepping back from the Ares rockets that the agency has staked its future on after the shuttle retires next year. In recent weeks, Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Boeing Co. have reached out to NASA officials, lawmakers and a presidentially appointed panel reviewing America's human-spaceflight plan, expressing a willingness to change plans or offering alternatives to the rockets that until recently they strongly advocated.

For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a new space vehicle will begin stacking on a mobile launch platform (MLP) at Kennedy Space Center, thanks to the hard work and dedication of an experienced team of employees from NASA and contractors United Space Alliance (USA) and Alliant Techsystems. The Ares I-X aft skirt, which was mated to a solid fuel segment in the Rotation, Processing and Surge Facility at KSC, rolled over to the 528-foot-tall Vehicle Assembly Building, where it will be lifted and placed on the MLP in High Bay 3.

The results of misbegotten space policy choices over the past decades are finally coming to a head in the new administration. The cans have been kicked down the road as far as possible with regard to when to retire the space shuttle, and the future of NASA’s human space flight program in general and the International Space Station (ISS) in particular. Indeed, we’re reaching a point of no return. Fortunately, at least some uncertainty has been reduced with recent reports that the U.S. is moving toward a decision to continue supporting ISS through 2020, despite the fact that it will...

HUNTSVILLE, AL -- The White House is expected to announce a major review of the Marshall Space Flight Center-managed Ares rocket program. The Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles have been in development to replace the aging space shuttle, which is set to retire by the end of 2010. Ares has come under criticism over the past year because the program has fallen behind schedule and is over budget. When announced five years ago, the Ares I had been slated for its first launch in 2014, but that date has fallen to 2015. Rep. Parker Griffith, D-Huntsville, confirmed the...

WASHINGTON — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's NASA transition team is asking U.S. space agency officials to quantify how much money could be saved by canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle next year. Obama pledged during his campaign to inject an additional $2 billion into NASA aimed in part at narrowing the gap between the space shuttle's retirement and the introduction of a successor system. While NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and his senior managers are adamant that Ares and Orion are the right vehicles to fill that role, Obama did not endorse either system...