Today, Anna is meeting Werner Herzog during his visit to Chapman University. Here are five reasons that space nerds and science buffs should be interested in Herzog. In the documentary Lo and Behold, he told Elon Musk that he’d be happy to go on a one-way trip to Mars. Musk would prefer to offer round-trips. See the story HERE. At the end of Wild Blue Yonder, Herzog says, … Continue reading Werner Herzog
Rebecca Green is the Assistant to the Dean in Schmid College of Science at Technology at Chapman University, where the Lofty Duo work. We’ve been on task teams with Rebecca and know her to be a space nerd through and through. So we’re happy to share her family vacation story. This summer, I was fortunate enough to include a day trip to the Canberra Deep … Continue reading Guest Blog: Rebecca Green on Deep Space Communication
Here’s Lofty Ambitions giving you an excuse to party on Friday! June 10, 1929: Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut Jim McDivitt was born in Chicago. He commanded his first spaceflight, something only a handful of astronauts have done. (As an aside, The Cure are playing in Chicago on Friday–just saying.) June 10, 1929: Biologist and author E.O. Wilson was also born on this date. He has … Continue reading Reasons to Celebrate This Weekend
Last week, Doug spent a day at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center (AFRC) attending a #NASASocial event dubbed #StateOfNASA. Read last week’s post HERE. #1. NACA’s 100th (last year) NASA’s predecessor organization was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). NACA was founded on March 3rd, 1915, a little more than eleven years after the Wright brothers first took to the skies. #2. NASA Langley’s … Continue reading Five Aviation and Space Anniversaries
We did not post last week. For the first time since this blog started in 2010, we missed a week. After a weekend away, we’d been scheduled to fly back home on Monday. Though weather had cleared up hours before our flight and though our aircraft had arrived (albeit an hour late), American Airlines had canceled a lot of flights that day and knew quickly that … Continue reading 5 Chicago Macy’s Planetary Windows
EarthSky offers readers “updates on your cosmos and world.” Today, they posted a guide to viewing the five visible planets in October 2015. And which planets might these be? MERCURY Of the eight planets in our Solar System, Mercury is both smallest and closest to the Sun. This past April, the spacecraft MESSENGER crashed into Mercury after orbiting the planet for four years, twice as long … Continue reading 5 Visible Planets
The events of the December 2014 Orion/EFT-1 NASA Social were jointly sponsored or hosted by the NASA social media and outreach teams from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Armstrong Flight Research Center. To begin this final post about that event, the Lofty Duo would like to say a big Thank You to the wonderful folks who make these events happen. Here’s are our live … Continue reading #Orion at JPL/Armstrong (Part 6)
START WITH PART 1 OF THIS SERIES BY CLICKING HERE. One of NASA’s most important missions for the future of human space exploration doesn’t—at least initially—call for astronauts. NASA is currently planning a deep space mission known as Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission or, in NASA-speak, ARRM. This approach is in keeping with tradition at NASA; robotic missions have always preceded humans into space. Before Neil … Continue reading #Orion at JPL/Armstrong (Part 5)
To start with Part 1, click HERE. The Orion/EFT-1 mission went off without a hitch last Friday. The four-and-a-half hour mission reached a height, or apogee, of 3,600 miles. That’s is as far as a human-rated spacecraft has travelled from the earth in forty-two years. As a part of the build-up to the Orion/EFT-1 mission, NASA held NASA Social events at multiple sites. Doug was … Continue reading #Orion at JPL/Armstrong (Part 3)
On October 12th, Doug spent the day at the 2014 iteration of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Open House. You can read the first Lofty installment HERE, but there’s more! It was a day full of space-nerd goodness, and one of the highpoints was Site 18: “Flying Saucers for Mars.” This particular site was dedicated to a project known to researchers by the acronym … Continue reading JPL Open House 2014 (Part 2)
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