Month: July 2021

Earth is the only planet in the solar system with an atmosphere that can sustain life. The blanket of gases that surrounds our home planet not only contains the air that we breathe but also protects us from blasts of heat and radiation emanating from the sun. It warms the planet by day and cools it at night. Earth’s atmosphere is about 300 miles (480 kilometers) thick, but most of it is within 10 miles (16 km) of the surface. Air pressure decreases with altitude. At sea level, air pressure…

Earth, our home, is the third planet from the sun. While scientists continue to hunt for clues of life beyond Earth, our home planet remains the only place in the universe where we’ve ever identified living organisms.  Earth is the fifth-largest planet in the solar system. It’s smaller than the four gas giants — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — but larger than the three other rocky planets, Mercury, Mars and Venus. Earth has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) and is mostly round because gravity generally pulls…

Amelia Earhart’s goggles — the pair she wore to become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932 — have now spanned another divide: the boundary between Earth and space. The well-traveled aviator specs, which Earhart once described as “rather historic,” lifted off again Tuesday (July 20) aboard Blue Origin’s first crewed flight of its New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle. “You can see she put tape over them to make less light come in because it was so bright all the day and she was flying…

Blue Origin will attempt an historic first crewed spaceflight Tuesday (July 20), as the company attempts to launch its billionaire founder Jeff Bezos and a crew of three to kick-start a space tourist program for those who’ve always wanted to fly in space. If all goes to plan, the company’s New Shepard rocket and capsule will take off for an 11-minute journey, launching and landing outside Van Horn, Texas at Blue Origin facilities, dubbed Launch Site One. The rocket will carry the spacecraft on a suborbital path before separating, allowing…

SpaceX fired up the massive booster rocket for its new Starship spacecraft Monday night (July 19) in a short first-of-its-kind test for the company’s ambitious new launch system.  The towering stainless-steel booster, called Super Heavy, ignited three Raptor engines in a brief “static fire” test on a pad at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in southern Texas, near the village of Boca Chica. Booster 3, as this particularly Super Heavy is known, is the latest in a series of prototypes for SpaceX’s Starship program, which aims to develop a fully reusable launch…