RSS Feeds
|
BR DE ES FR IT JP NL UK US
Babblebaby
|
Defamer
|
Gizmodo
|
Kotaku
|
Lifehacker
How do you get rid of a gigantic downed transport plane? Well, you could take it apart piece by piece or move it to a junkyard. Or, if you're feeling a bit more adventurous, you could blow it the hell up. Guess which option the UK Royal Air Force chose?
While space travel is safe for the most part, sometimes things go really wrong. Like last week's NASA's rocket explosion on the Wallops Island, where an ATK Launch Vehicle X-1 exploded only seconds after liftoff, with hazardous debris falling on land and sea. We are used to seeing the fireworks in the air, but what happens when that flaming debris hits the ground is much more spectacular and scary, as you can see in this video.
Mythbusters returns for a whole new season tomorrow, August 6, and they were nice enough to drop a preview of their first episode off while they were on their way to blowing shit up. One of the experiments they're going to test is whether explosives can tenderise a steak as well as a traditional tenderisers. Can it? We're not sure—you'll have to watch Discovery at 9PM tomorrow to find out. [Mythbusters]
Bad news for private space flight aficionados--SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket lifted off live via webcast last night, and then proceded to blow up spectacularly in the sky over the Pacific Ocean. If you were following along on the official SpaceX website, you probably saw this: "20:38 PDT — We have heard from launch control that there has been an anomaly. More details will be posted to the website as available." The site remains the same this morning, but Space.com has learned that two rocket stages "failed to separate about two minutes and 20 seconds into launch" and the rocket blew itself to smithereens around 11:36 p.m. EDT. The pubs are calling this "strike three" for SpaceX, but it should be known billionaire backer Elon Musk has two more rockets left to prove his private firm is a reliable way to transport satellites to low Earth orbit.
Even while I knew what was going to happen when I saw this video, it shocked me when I saw it exploding the way it did, with no warning whatsoever. To be honest, I don't know if this Saudi fighter jet is a real fighter jet or not. It sounds like one, it looks like one, and it explodes like one, so it must be an aeroplane or a duck. But somehow, some people think it may be an RC model. Still, the idea of the plane just exploding like that reminds you how fragile our technological world is--says the guy taking a plane on Monday. What do you people think? Real or model?
Joe Pappalardo got some crisp, high quality military close-ups of the Spirit of Kansas, the US$1.2 billion stealth B-2 bomber that crashed in Guam last February. We published other images of the crash scene before (because we like to see a billion dollars burning), but all the mess was cleaned up then. Here you can see the carnage right after it happened, including Air Force personnel trying to deactivate explosives in the ejected pilot seats:
A B-2 Bomber, probably the coolest aircraft ever created after the Lockheed A-12, has crashed for the first time ever. Its name was the Spirit of Kansas and it was one of the 21 US$1.2 billion Northrop Grumman stealth plane ever manufactured. It fell to the ground right after take-off for "unknown reasons" at the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. Both pilots ejected to safety and, although there's no video footage of the actual crash, the mess on the runway was huge:
Mythbusters returns for a whole new season tomorrow, August 6, and they were nice enough to drop a preview of their first episode off while they were on their way to blowing shit up. One of the experiments they're going to test is whether explosives can tenderise a steak as well as a traditional tenderisers. Can it? We're not sure—you'll have to watch Discovery at 9PM tomorrow to find out. [