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Electric Icarus: NASA Designs a One-Man Stealth Plane

Could the Puffin, an electric-powered flying suit, change the way we use the sky in war and peace?

A super-quiet, hover-capable aircraft design, NASA’s experimental one-man Puffin could show just how much electric propulsion can transform our ideas of flight. It looks like nothing less than a flying suit or a jet pack with a cockpit.
On [...]

Combating climate change by observing the Earth

Image via Wikipedia

As part of the U.S. charm offensive at the recent Copenhagen summit on climate change, a roughly one meter-diameter orb helped display a decade’s worth of climate data collected by NASA satellites. “This is the golden age,” NASA’s Jack Kaye told me. As associate research director for the agency’s Earth Science Division, he’s [...]

A prize for a moon lander will be won this month

Image via Wikipedia

IF PEOPLE are to explore the moon again they will need ways of travelling across the lunar surface and also of digging holes in it. But because America’s space agency, NASA, spends most of its money on the space station and the shuttle, little is left over for the innovative research and development [...]

Wasted Space: U.S. Military Looking for Ideas on How to Curb the Threat of Orbiting Junk

The number of man-made objects drifting aimlessly in orbit has grown steadily for years thanks to rocket launches that deposit spent boosters in space as well as satellite retirements