Tag: spaceflight
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When testing gravity, no news is good news
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Looking for nothing to test gravity When they look for violations of Einstein’s general relativity, physicists deliberately plan experiments to find nothing at all. For Symmetry Magazine: In 1887, […]
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Yvonne Brill and the technology keeping satellites in orbit
In a certain sense, it’s easy to keep things in orbit around Earth. However, it’s hard to keep satellites in a specific orbit, which is what matters most for communicating with them and they with us, whatever task they’re designed to perform. Thanks to the work of rocket engineer Yvonne Brill in the early 1970s, […]
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Jumping from the “edge of space”…whatever that means
Yesterday, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner (best known for jumping off skyscrapers) successfully completed a 39 kilometer dive from a balloon. Many media outlets described his jump as beginning “at the edge of space”, but the story is a little more complex than that. One thing bothered me, though, about a lot of the coverage: many […]
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