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Washington, August 2 (ANI): The NASA Innovative Partnerships Program and the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation have announced the Green Flight Challenge, which is a flight efficiency competition for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon. The prize for the aircraft with the best performance is 1.5 million dollars. The competition is scheduled for July 2011 at the Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, California. A variety of innovative experimental aircraft using electrical, solar, bio-fuel or hybrid propulsion are expected to enter. Several major universities and aircraft builders have expressed their intention to enter teams in the challenge. To win, teams must use cutting-edge technologies in mechanical and electrical engineering, structures, aerodynamics and thermodynamics. As a national showcase of “green” technology, the challenge is expected to help advanc...

Viking 2 entered Mars orbit on Aug. 7, 1976, and set about separating fact from fiction surrounding the red planet. In 1906, "Mars and its Mystery" (Little, Brown and Co.) theorized that a "large, irregular, dark region" contained "bodies of waters, or seas. Š From remote times it has been taken for granted by the best of minds that other worlds besides ours sustain life." Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who developed the Saturn V that launched Americans to the moon, and Willy Ley discussed long-held theories in "The Exploration of Mars," (The Viking Press/1956). They wrote: "This was the picture of Mars at mid-century: a small planet of which three-quarters is cold desert, with the rest covered with a sort of plant life that our biological knowledge cannot quite encompass." In the mid-1890s, astronomer Percival Lowell was lecturing on Martian features he called canals, Mark Littman stated in "Planets Beyond" (Wiley Sc...

Astronaut Koichi Wakata (R) of the Japanese space agency JAXA, and other crew members take part in a news conference after they returned to Earth aboard the space shuttle Endeavour at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida July 31, 2009. From right are Wakata, David Wolf, Thomas Marshburn, Julie Payette of the Canadian Space Agency, Christopher Cassidy, Pilot Douglas Hurley and Mission Commander Mark Polansky.(Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

The Review of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee is expected to publish its report at the end of the month. It is charged with the thankless task of reaffirming or redirecting NASA's vision for space exploration. What should the agency be doing with its existing hardware and its plans for the future? The real catch is the part of their charter that reads, “fitting within the current budget profile for NASA exploration activities.” Money isn't NASA's only problem, but it has been its biggest problem for decades. NASA is one of the most successful agencies in history, providing the best return on investment of any government agency in my lifetime. My main concerns with NASA's plans going forward include the decision to ground the space shuttle, the woefully inadequate funding for the last several decades and the absence of a space program that will restore the sense of wonder and adventure to space exploration that we knew in the 1960s. The continuing debate for ...

Computerworld - After a grueling and technically intensive 16-day mission in space, the seven-person crew of the space shuttle Endeavour safely touched down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this morning. The shuttle landed as scheduled at 10:48 a.m. ET. It was a picture-perfect landing for a shuttle that had a tough time getting off the ground due to a gaseous hydrogen leak that scuttled two scheduled launches and bad weather that derailed three other attempts. The shuttle finally blasted off on July 15 - its sixth launch attempt. Yesterday, mission control specialists found that one of Endeavour's forward thrusters, which control altitude and speed upon re-entry, failed during a test of control systems. As shown today, NASA had reported that the shuttle could land safely without the thruster. Returning from orbit, the shuttle and its crew left behind a new porch for the Japanese laboratory on the International Space Station, new batteries installed to store power collected from...

Many people doubt the value of America’s manned space program and the billions of dollars spent on it annually. These naysayers simply don’t see what good comes from going to space. The value of human exploration of space is lost on them. They get no thrill from knowing men and women have left this mortal coil for the blackness of space, that men have walked on the moon and littered the rocky orb’s surface like inconsiderate campers. The fact is, the U.S. space program has spawned dozens of products, from enhanced baby formula to advanced means of breast cancer detection. NASA research has helped give us scratch-resistant lenses, more aerodynamic golf balls, voice-controlled wheelchairs, improved aircraft engines and advanced lubricants. But the latest innovation to come through the space research and development pipeline may just be the most significant — semi-permanent underwear. Astronaut Koichi Wakata spent the past four and one-half months aboard the International Space Station. H...

A Penn State study of climate change, conducted for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, attempts to predict the 21st century impact of global warming on the Keystone State. While a noble attempt to give citizens a heads-up on possible future climate conditions, it contains numerous scientific flaws and unsubstantiated assumptions that render the predictions useless. Key to the report is its assumption that global warming will raise global and statewide temperatures by 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 4 degrees Celsius) during the 21st century. Investigators at Penn State's Environment and Natural Resources Institute reached this conclusion by simply accepting the projections of United Nations computer models -- models that have failed miserably to predict current climate conditions. For example, in 2001 U.N. computer models predicted 0.2 to 0.4 degrees Celsius of global warming during the ensuing decade. We have nearly completed that decade and yet NASA satellit...