The slope of an unnamed mountain near the moon’s north pole will be the final destination for NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft, which are scheduled to crash into the lunar surface at high speed today. The impacts are planned for 5:28 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The twin probes, nicknamed Ebb and Flow, have orbited the moon [...]

We all learned that President John F. Kennedy launched the U.S. effort to land the first men on the moon. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” he famously stated in his Rice University speech in 1962. [...]

  Recently, I received a press release from the American Museum of Natural History on their excellent exhibit about the future of space exploration. I did a quick word search: “Mars” got 14 hits; “asteroid” 12; “moon/lunar” 11; “Europa” and “Jupiter” a total of four. A check of “Venus” came up empty. Considering that all [...]

This is the third of a three-part series that looks back at the 30-year history of the U.S. space shuttle program. Before the 1986 Challenger disaster made safety paramount and new constraints had been established, the shuttle could carry fueled upper-stage rockets to launch space probes, which embarked for planetary destinations. From low orbit to [...]

This is the second of a three-part series that looks back at the 30-year history of the U.S. space shuttle program. Any summary of the shuttle program cannot go on without mentioning 14 lost astronauts and two doomed vehicles—Challenger on launch in 1986 and Columbia on reentry in 17 years later. Both events punctuated periods [...]

One of my first posts for Plugged In involved the electric car. Now, remember: it’s hard to get too worked up about electric cars. They’re better than gas burners, to be sure, but that’s setting the bar pretty low: electric cars are basically coal-burners that continue to enable sprawl and all its problems while being [...]

Today’s Monday Music Video is not a music video per se, but instead features three songs from a soundtrack to an excellent movie about the Apollo missions. Evoking a sense of weightlessness and other-worldliness is an intuitive goal for most music on videos, movies, and TV programs featuring space and space travel. No one has [...]