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    These engineers and tech execs want to create a peaceful lunar settlement

    A group of Silicon Valley tech executives and engineers want to create a peaceful, multinational lunar settlement. According to Bloomberg, the San Francisco-based Open Lunar Foundation plans to invest in hardware "to accelerate the exploration and settlement of the moon." And it's committed to creating a kind of cooperative that wouldn't be tied to one particular country or billionaire.

    Christine Fisher
    09.05.2019

  • Google to take over huge NASA hangar, give execs' private planes a home

    You might get zero hits now when you search for pics of a giant fleet of Google zeppelins, but that could change in the not-too-distant future. Planetary Ventures, one of the company's subsidiaries, just got into an agreement to take over a humongous NASA hangar (named Hangar One) in Mountain View that's big enough to house a slew of dirigibles. To be exact, Google will lease Hangar One and its surrounding land, including its associated airfield, from NASA -- that is, if the two can agree on the lease's terms. Considering Google's rolling in dough, however, price will likely not be an issue. If the deal goes through, Planetary Ventures will re-skin Hangar One (it was stripped down to its metal framework years ago), build an educational facility and upgrade an existing golf course in the area. It will also handle the airfield's operations, so NASA can slash off its maintenance costs and earn from the lease at the same time. It's unclear what exactly Google plans to do to more than eight acres of space, but we're guessing it's big enough to house its many projects, its execs' numerous jets and even all its internet balloons. [Image credit: Erik Charlton/Flickr]

    Mariella Moon
    02.11.2014

  • Vizualized: Bay Area bids adieu to Space Shuttle Endeavour (update: video)

    NASA and the US government may have moved on from the shuttle program, but it's clear that the American people are still in love with our nation's cosmic cargo planes. An estimated 20,000 people showed up at the Ames Research Center/Moffet Air Force Base in Mountain View, California this morning to see Endeavour buzz the tower. With so many folks itchin' to see Endeavour's farewell tour firsthand, the line to get in was lengthy, but we braved the crowds to bring you some shots of the action. Enjoy. [Thanks to Chris Williams for helping with some of the crowd shots] Update: Canon/RED guru and LA-based DP Vincent Laforet caught the shuttle's final approach and landing at LAX. You'll find the slow-motion clip, shot at 5K resolution on a RED Epic at 96 frames-per-second with an 800mm Canon f/5.6 lens, just past the break.

    Michael Gorman
    09.21.2012

  • ArduSat wants to put Arduino satellite, your experiments into orbit

    Short of scoring a spot on the ISS experiment docket, putting your scientific aspirations into orbit can be a bit tricky. Why not try crowdsourcing your way into space? ArduSat's barking up that very tree, asking Kickstarter contributors to help them get a Arduino CubeSat off the ground. Headed by NanoSatisfi, a tech startup operating out of NASA's Ames Research Center, the project hopes to raise enough funds to launch an Arduino bank and a bevy of open-source sensors into orbit. The payoff for backers? Access. Varying levels of contribution are rewarded with personalized space broadcasts, remote access to the space hardware's onboard cameras and even use of the machine's sensors to run experiments of the backer's own design. If all goes well, the team hopes to launch more satellites for the everyman, including a unit dedicated to letting would-be stellar photographers take celestial snapshots. Sure, it's far cry from actually launching yourself into the stars, but would you rather be a tourist, or a scientist? Check out project at the source link below, and mull over that for awhile.

    Sean Buckley
    06.18.2012

  • NASA's shuttle PCs sold with sensitive data intact, insert WikiLeaks joke here

    Let this be a warning for John and Jane Q. Public (always a cute couple, those two) to always wipe sensitive / secret data from your hard drives before selling a computer. Or better yet, take out the drive entirely and physically destroy it. That's what we'd expect from our government entities, but an internal investigation found that a number of PCs and components from NASA's shuttles had been sold from four different centers -- Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers, and Ames and Langley Research Centers -- that "failed sanitization verification testing," or weren't even tested at all. In Langley's case, while hard drives were being destroyed, "personnel did not properly account for or track the removed hard drives during the destruction process." Meanwhile at Kennedy, computers were found being prepped for sale that still had "Internet Protocol information [that] was prominently displayed." Helluva way to start a shuttle launch retirement, eh?

    Ross Miller
    12.08.2010

  • NASA turns iPhone into chemical sensor, can an App Store rejection be far away?

    People have been trying to turn cellphones into medical and atmospheric scanners for some time now, but when it's NASA stepping up to the plate with a little device to monitor trace amounts of chemicals in the air, it's hard to not start thinking we might finally have a use for all those tricorder ringtones. Developed by a team of researchers at the Ames Research Center led by Jing Li, the device is a small chip that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone and uses 16 nanosensors to detect the concentration of gasses like ammonia, chlorine, and methane. To what purpose exactly this device will serve and why the relatively closed iPhone was chosen as a development platform are mysteries we're simply not capable of answering. Damn it, man, we're bloggers not scientists! Update: George Yu, a developer who wrote this implementation for Jing Li, commented to let us know that the choice to go with the iPhone was made because it was "cool," but he soon realized that choice was a "horrible mistake." We're guessing that could have something to do with an apparent lack of wireless coverage at Ames if the above screenshot is anything to go by. [Via Gizmodo]

    Tim Stevens
    11.13.2009