NASA plans to donate or lend three of its space shuttles to museums in 2010 -- but the co-founder of a rocket launch firm thinks the shuttles could help send humans to Mars.

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The B-2 stealth bomber, assisted by midair refuelings, can fly a 44-hour mission to the other side of the world, take out targets using laser-guided smart munitions, then sneak out of enemy territory undetected. Yet it runs on Intel 286 processors -- state of the art in 1982, but these days, not so much.

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There's playing online games, and then there's collecting 68 virtual "husbands" in a game. That's when Chinese parents intervene and send their wayward offspring to a boot camp staffed by soldiers of the People's Liberation Army.

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While it’s a safe bet that few Hamas members know the lyrics to “the Star Spangled Banner”, very little separates their activities from those witnessed by Francis Scott Key centuries ago. In what has become a hallmark of guerilla war, Hamas has used a mixture of low-tech weapons and simple tactics to stymie a technologically superior enemy.

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The Mars Desert Research Station, located in the Utah desert near the town of Hanksville, is a simulated Mars habitat that serves as a testbed for field operations studies in preparation for future human missions to Mars.

Volunteer crews live at the station, testing habitat design features and technologies. From December 27 to January 2, six college students served as the MDRS crew, as participants in NASA's Spaceward Bound program.

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You’ve just landed on the Red Planet and are looking for a fresh start. Sure, that job selling respirators at the local space-hardware store sounds cozy, but it’s a dead-end career. Mars will be ripe with opportunity; you just have to figure out how to tap it. So here’s the secret: Go into construction. You’ll learn useful skills and be out on the surface, where the real action is. Explore the landscape on coffee breaks. All you need to do is stumble upon a nice deposit of precious material—like platinum or deuterium, a hydrogen isotope that could fuel fusion reactors—and you’ll have it made.

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There’s a little bit of water inside each kernel of popcorn, and if you can heat the kernel above 212°F, that water should boil, turn into high-pressure steam, and pop the kernel. But in orbit, things aren’t so simple. First off, the cold vacuum of space would suck all the water out of the kernel before it could pop the corn. So any ordinary kernels would drop, not pop. But let’s say we figured out a way to keep the kernel watertight. In that case, it all depends. [ Read Full Story ]

There is no denying we humans are obsessed with real estate. We always like to think we've landed ourselves a prime piece of land to settle on, and that outlook extends past your home, vacation home, and country and all the way out to the Earth itself.

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Mars Science Laboratory
Launching in the fall, this research rover will collect and examine Martian soil and rock samples for traces of carbon, life’s most common building block. To find that carbon, ChemCam will fire lasers at the ground and analyze the vapor produced by the impact.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
NASA is going back to the moon—after the LRO finds astronauts a good place to land. Launching on April 24, the LRO will map out the moon’s surface and home in on the poles, where scientists believe there could be water.

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Earth’s twin could be waiting for us hundreds of light-years away. In fact, thousands of Earth doppelgängers may be lurking in the cosmic distance, orbiting stars just like our sun and maybe, just maybe, harboring life of their own. Although telescopes have identified more than 300 planets outside our solar system, most of them are too harsh to host life. One notable exception to the typical “hot Jupiter” model is a rocky Earth-like planet discovered in 2007, dubbed Gliese 581 c.

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NASA will fire up its latest rocket this April for its first test flight. Ares 1 is designed to haul a 25-ton payload, making it capable of ferrying either six astronauts to the International Space Station or four astronauts to low-Earth orbit, where they can transfer to another vehicle and head to the moon. The rocket contains two stages: a reusable solid rocket booster and an engine powered by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. If all goes well with Orion, NASA’s planned crew vehicle, Ares 1 will be whisking the first crews into space by 2015.

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Should they cast their eyes skyward at just the right moment, a few lucky observers could see something spectacular this summer: a Boeing 747 splitting open a ballistic missile with a laser in mid-flight. After 12 years and $5 billion in R&D, the Missile Defense Agency’s Airborne Laser (ABL) will make its first real-world attempt to shoot down a missile in midair.

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Nothing inspires innovation like a seven-figure check, which is why more and more private and government sources are offering big money for creative technologies -- and plenty of Americans are rising to the challenge. The California company Scaled Composites won the $10-million Ansari X Prize in 2004 for its trips to suborbital space on SpaceShipOne, a feat that all but launched the private space industry. And in 2007, Carnegie Mellon University won the $2-million Darpa Urban Challenge, bringing us one step closer to a world in which cars drive themselves.

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NASA Administrator Michael Griffin is not playing nice with the Obama transition team, according to a post by Robert Block of the Orlando Sentinel. He reports that Griffin is resisting efforts by former NASA associate administrator Lori Garver, who heads Obama's space transition team, to "look under the hood" of the space program.

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