Free Republic

ORLANDO, Fla. - Florida residents lit up social media on Saturday after hearing the sound of sonic booms and not knowing what caused them. Turns out, Boeing's X-37B – an autonomous spaceplane that spent over 900 days in space on a U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force mission – had secretly returned to Earth.

Second Loud Boom Rattles Windows In NY May Have Been Meteorite (3/9/2009) There's been another loud "boom." This time it rattled windows in parts of Rockland County. Nanuet resident Keith Wallenstein said the mysterious noise woke him up at about 5:15 Monday morning and sounded like someone had flown an F-16 over his house. An earlier loud "boom" heard in Westchester County early Saturday might have been a meteorite. Police and The Journal News got a flurry of reports from people in Scarsdale, Mount Vernon, Yonkers, Tuckahoe, Eastchester and Bronxville. Weather officials say there was no thunder in the area...

Early fighter pilots were sometimes called knights of the air, a reflection of medieval times when knights used blunted lances in jousting tournaments to dismount competitors from their horses. Now, jet-borne jousting is combating supersonic shockwaves, hopefully enough to lessen the resulting sonic boom heard on the ground. Gulfstream Aerospace and NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center have teamed in a project called Quiet Spike to investigate the suppression of sonic booms. The project centers around a retractable, 24-foot-long lance-like spike mounted on the nose of NASA Dryden's F-15B research testbed aircraft. The spike, made primarily of composite materials, creates three...

The Israeli military Saturday ordered troops to move towards the sector north of the Gaza Strip, after a launching air strikes on the territory following militant rocket attacks, public radio said. A possible Israeli ground operation in the Palestinian territory, however complex in the wake of the army's historic pullout from the Gaza Strip on September 12, is being discussed by Israeli defence officials, the radio said. Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz was convening an emergency meeting of his top officials in Tel Aviv to evaluate the situation, the radio said. Palestinian militants have fired 30 makeshift rockets into Israel...

Two examples of ground-breaking advancements in aerospace from the Antelope Valley have been honored by Popular Science magazine as this year's "Best of What's New." Burt Rutan's entry into the civilian space race, called Tier One, won the Grand Award in the space and aviation category. Also honored in that category was the Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstration, an effort by Northrop Grumman Corp. and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to lessen the strength of sonic booms created by supersonic aircraft. Consisting of the rotund SpaceShipOne spacecraft and the spindly White Knight carrier aircraft, Tier One is the latest endeavor...

EDWARDS AFB - After more than 55 years of window-rattling and heart-thumping sonic booms, the familiar "Sound of Freedom" may be in for a change. In flights this week in the same supersonic corridor used by Chuck Yeager, a modified F-5 "Freedom Fighter" jet successfully proved that changing the shape of an aircraft can lessen the impact of breaking the sound barrier for those on the ground. "We're trying to fix what Chuck Yeager broke," said Northrop Grumman chief test pilot Roy Martin. In two flights Wednesday, the F-5 with a specially-shaped nose produced a smaller sonic boom than a...

The STS-111 and Expedition Four crews are headed to Edwards Air Force Base in California. STS-111 Commander Ken Cockrell and pilot Paul Lockhart fired Space Shuttle Endeavour's engines at 12:50 p.m. EDT today to begin the descent. Endeavour is scheduled to touch down at 1 :58 p.m. EDT. This is the 49th landing at Edwards. (Full Story)(06/18/2002)