As if you didn't get enough of staying up past your bedtime during the New Year celebrations this past weekend, another event tonight may get you up and out in the dark. It's the Quadrantid Meteor Shower!

This celestial light show is the first of 2012, and best viewed from rural areas along the Eastern seaboard of the United States down to Georgia, starting from around 3am until dawn. That means no show for city folk, since you'll need to be somewhere without lights (even street lights, preferably) to view the sky dark enough. In other words, it's the perfect evening for some cold weather camping, if you can handle it.

What you're in for, however, will be awesome, according to ABC News: ]]> JetSetCD 2012-01-03T16:01:13-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/10/16/22100/091

Where in the world is Richard Branson? He's in the Mojave Desert today, for the official dedication of Spaceport America, the base and building for all the fun of Virgin Galactic.

Here's the thing, though—Spaceport America has already been "open" now since May, when their three-hour tours began. Today was just all the official pomp and circumstance, plus a little show-off flight from SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. ]]> JetSetCD 2011-10-17T15:17:47-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/10/12/123334/12

Just like being able to see Space Shuttle (RIP) launches from airplanes, spotting the Northern Lights from flights seems impossible, a tall tale. But, as you can guess from the photo above, it's TRUE; if your flight is in the right place at the right time with the right conditions, the Aurora Borealis could be your in-flight entertainment.

We can personally vouch for this, since the rare experience just happened for us earlier this month on a flight from Seattle to New York. Now, we'd heard of others spotting the mysterious green hues on the horizon, but we always assumed you had to be higher—over the North Atlantic or closer to the Arctic Circle—to truly have a worthy view of the display. Not so! Just after reaching altitude on our red eye, our JetBlue captain directed everyone to peek out the left side to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights. ]]> JetSetCD 2011-10-12T12:58:10-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/8/29/13485/4928

As part of our ongoing effort to track space tourism competition—because how else is the price ever going to drop enough so we can afford it—please turn your attention to the bloon.

Designed by Spanish entrepreneur Jose Lopez-Urdiales, the bloon is a sub-orbital device (kind of) that takes people to space (in a manner of speaking) and is scheduled to start flying in 2013 (theoretically). We're hedging on this description because the bloon isn't so much a spaceship like we've all become used to, as much as it is a really big hot air balloon.

The project webpage is reasonably slick, though the branding is kind of gratingly New Agey. There's lots of hand waving about going to "a place where borders do not really exist" and "where creation becomes real," with a promise to "help awaken consciousness of the unique, fragile beauty of our planet" so that you can become "one with your home planet." If we didn't know better we'd think it was kind of a parody, but other parts of the site seem reasonably straightforward.]]> Omri 2011-08-29T15:39:55-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/8/15/14858/4035

The United States doesn't really have a space travel program any more, inasmuch as our leaders found better and more inspirational programs to fund than ones that have astronauts literally reaching for the stars (e.g. empty rural airports in the home states of powerful Senators).

The problem is that NASA still has engineers and scientists who need to run experiments in low-gravity and no-gravity conditions, and they'd kind of like to keep doing some of those. So agency officials looked around, scratched their collective heads, and checked if there was still anyone still doing that space flight thing.

And that's the short version of how Virgin Galactic became NASA's official sub-contracter. The press release is here, and if you click through make sure you at least read the bolded quote in the middle of the release. It's the longest string of words that mean the least that you'll ever encounter.]]> Omri 2011-08-15T15:34:05-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/8/9/23914/38374

The space race is way over, and sadly so is the entire NASA Space Shuttle program as well. But just because we aren't shipping astronauts up into orbit anymore doesn't mean the US isn't playing around still in outer space. Today actually marks the second test launch of a strange form of airplane-slash-rocket: the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (FTVH2). Capable of cruising at over 13,000mph (that's Mach 20 or 20x the speed of sound), the unmanned FTVH2 isn't a new travel or research toy, but a military one.

Around 7am PDT, an 8-story Minotaur IV rocket will shoot into the skies from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Inside of it waits the Falcon, until, as International Business Times reports:

The rocket will puncture the atmosphere and releases FTVH2. Then the super-fast weapon will glide over the Pacific Ocean at nearly 20 times the speed of sound. The test flight will last 30 minutes before the FHTV2 hit the water and sink near the Kwajalein Atoll, about 4,100 miles from the Vandenberg Air Force Base. If the aircraft can complete its 30 minute flight, the project will continue otherwise the project will be shelved indefinitely.

]]> JetSetCD 2011-08-10T08:56:08-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2011/8/8/142657/4433

We've spent the last few years tracking how private space tourism is becoming a capital-T Thing—and of course now that the space shuttle program is dead, private space flight is for better or worse the only game in town.

You might also remember a post from last year about commercial space travel company Space Adventures, which inked a deal with Boeing for vehicles that could be shot into low-earth orbit. We speculated at the time that the world was still many years from regular launches, both because it takes time to build spaceships and because we still don't really have the infrastructure to launch them.

All of that aside, we're certainly getting closer. There are now contests springing up promising to send lucky winners into space, with the latest coming from the team behind the Seattle Space Needle. The iconic tourist attraction was built for the 1962 World's Fair and, as its 50th anniversary celebration approaches, organizers want to recapture some of that futuristic magic. ]]> Omri 2011-08-08T15:19:38-05:00 Search Jaunted string http://www.jaunted.com/search/