Published: Feb 21, 2012
To the Editor: Re “ At 90, John Glenn Looks Back ” (Feb. 14): I think it is appropriate to praise John Glenn. He took chances in going into space. As a onetime engineer myself, however, I protest lauding astronauts before the engineers who got them into space and back home again. Someday I hope to see The New York Times acknowledge that
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Published: Feb 19, 2012
The most obvious sign that there is a lot of junk in space is how much of it has been falling out of the sky lately: a defunct NASA satellite last year, a failed Russian space probe this year. While the odds are tiny that anyone on Earth will be hit, the chances that all this orbiting litter will interfere with working satellites or the
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Published: Feb 19, 2012
A LITTLE over a year ago, Maine Huts & Trails opened its newest backcountry eco-lodge in the mountains of western Vacationland. Each of the lodges, now numbering three, has hot showers and private guesthouses and serves breakfasts and dinners prepared with locally sourced organic ingredients. Ditto the brown bag lunches. Connecting them is a
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Published: Feb 16, 2012
THERE’S more to New York Fashion Week than the model gawking, the party flocking and the celebrity spotting. This twice-a-year industry event is still somewhat about buying and selling clothes, and much of that takes place far from the glare of the news media: in small showrooms and out-of-time factory floors. It’s almost like a
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Published: Feb 16, 2012
WASHINGTON — Impatient with the slow pace of international climate change negotiations, a small group of countries led by the United States is starting a program to reduce emissions of common pollutants that contribute to rapid climate change and widespread health problems. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to announce the
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Published: Feb 16, 2012
Swiss scientists say they plan to launch a “janitor satellite” specially designed to get rid of orbiting debris known as space junk. The $11 million satellite, called CleanSpace One, the prototype for a family of spacecraft, is being built by the Swiss Space Center at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne. The institute
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Published: Feb 14, 2012
In the winter of 1962, the nation needed a hero. Americans had yet to recover from the Soviet Union's launching of the first spacecraft, Sputnik, in October 1957 -- a rude jolt to our confidence as world leaders in all things technological. The space race was on. Soon after he took office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had thrown down the
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Published: Feb 14, 2012
Q.Is the sun a noisy place? A. The Sun's boiling and bubbling gases create a noisy throbbing, and the resulting sound waves are being used by scientists to study the interior of the star. But the sound waves are trapped inside the Sun, according to NASA scientists, and while they become visible as waves when they reach the surface, their
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Published: Feb 10, 2012
Janice Voss, a space shuttle astronaut and scientist who explored the behavior of fire in weightlessness, how plants adapt to extraterrestrial flight and an array of other phenomena while logging nearly 19 million miles circling Earth, died on Monday at a hospital in Scottsdale, Ariz. She was 55 and lived in Houston. The cause was cancer, her
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Published: Feb 04, 2012
Six months before the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Florida on Jan. 28, 1986, Roger Boisjoly wrote a portentous memo. He warned that if the weather was too cold, seals connecting sections of the shuttle's huge rocket boosters could fail. ''The result could be a catastrophe of the highest order, loss of human life,'' he wrote. The memo was
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