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The Shenlong Spaceplane: Hyperventilating Hypersonics or Real Threat?
"At a minimum, Washington should delay the planned 2010 retirement of the Space Shuttle until a new space plane can replace it, as a way to retain a deterring potential military capability. China’s unwillingness to comment on its military space plans, coupled with the Shenlong space plane, confirms its larger aversion to military transparency. The…
The Problem With Debris: The ASAT Test One Year Later
About this time last year (11 Jan), China conducted the now infamous direct-ascent ASAT (Anti-Satellite) hit-to-kill test. We have written to some degree about it already – notably here and here. Both articles describe the notorious aspect of the test – the addition of significant amounts of debris to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). How much? …
Flightdeck Friday Special Edition: The Space Shuttle – Thirty Years of Dreams, Sweat and Tears
The dream was given form and fire on April 12, 1981 with the launch of STS-1, the world’s first reusable spaceplane — the Shuttle Columbia. At the controls were a crew of only two, Astronauts John W. Young, commander for the mission, and Robert Crippen (both Naval Aviators) for this first “test flight” which would…
CAPT Wally Schirra, USN-Ret.: 12 Mar 1923 – 3 May 2007
“Are you a turtle?” I had always wanted to go to the Navy. As a young kid, I was intrigued by a Naval Officer with the beautiful brown shoes and sharp gold wings.- Wally Schirra Born into an aviator family (his father had gone to Canada during WW1 to earn his wings and his mom…
Lunar Reflections
And so here we are, on the cusp of the 40th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon – where have we come in those forty years? As a star-crossed (literally) youth in 1969, my imagination was fired by the likes of the space program. From Sheppard’s sub-orbital flight that I recall watching from…
And Then There Were Two…
Atlantis Lifts Off Space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the STS-132 mission to the International Space Station at 2:20 p.m. EDT on May 14. The third of five shuttle missions planned for 2010, this was the last planned launch for Atlantis. The Russian-built Mini…


