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Over the River and Through the Woods, to Costa Rica's Massive Arenal Volcano

You know Kai. Last week he detailed how he made his surfing adventure happen. Today, he drops some intel on the famous Arenal volcano in Costa Rica...

Volcanoes are cool—giant mountain things with a hole that goes to the bottom of the earth, full of boiling hot lava and belching smoke and soot into the air. There's something very prehistoric and intimidating about them. Oh, and every now and then they explode and turn lethal. Both cool and a bit scary then.

My typical vacations are usually by the water (not many volcanos there) or at ski hills (likewise), so I'd never had the opportunity to see a volcano up close and personal. Then, on my recent surf trip to Costa Rica, I decided to take a couple of days away from the water and go check out the volcano Arenal, one of the ten most active in the world. It last erupted as recently as 1968, when it destroyed three small villages, killing 87 people in the process. Arenal is the real deal; it's most definitely not a Disney volcano.

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Where to Watch the First Meteor Shower of 2012...Tonight

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:

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True or False? You Can See the Northern Lights from an Airplane.

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.

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Hey, Who Wants to Go to Space in a Giant Hot Air Balloon?

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.

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Space Tourism / Virgin Galactic / Science Travel / Richard Branson / Space Travel / Travel News / Virgin / → All Tags

NASA Hires Virgin Galactic to Cover All That Space Flying Stuff

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.

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A Rocket-Airplane Will Fly Mach 20 Today, But Won't Be Taking Passengers

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.

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Seattle's Space Needle Wants to Send You to...Umm...Space

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.

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Can Airplane Landings Give You Headaches? Science Investigates!

We're thinking of starting an ongoing series about bad travel "studies." Last time it was the report about how cell phones can bring down airplanes, a conclusion that the authors reached after copying down several anecdotes describing things that made no sense. A few flight attendants insisted that one time there were problems on their flight, and then they made someone turn off an iPhone, and then the problems totally went away—and then someone published a report about it. Because why not?

Today's entry comes from the International Headache Congress, which sounds like something out of The Onion but is actually an academic (?) conference co-sponsored by the International Headache Society and the American Headache Society. Researchers announced that they've discovered "distinct form of headache" that you can only get during the last few minutes of a flight before your airplane lands.

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Virgin Galactic / Space Tourism / Science Travel / Richard Branson / Space Travel / Travel News / Virgin / → All Tags

Space Tourism Six Years From Now to Be Kind of Affordable

Obviously "affordable" is a relative concept when it comes to space tourism. But we've been telling you for a while to keep your fingers crossed for competition between Virgin Galactic and potential rivals, if only because that way we can all dream about one day maybe flying in a sub-orbital. Prices aren't going to drop in the next few years for a bunch of reasons, from the fact that Virgin Galactic is the only company building a spaceport—which kind of puts a damper on competition—to the simple high costs of flying people into space.

Even at this early stage, though, serious people are beginning to envision how space tourism might become more available to more people. Virgin Galactic's former President Will Whitehorn just gave a far-reaching talk on the topic, and he predicted that ticket prices would drop from their current price of $200,000 to below $100,000.

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Let's Talk Space Tourism. What's Virgin Galactic Been Up To Lately?

Six months after its first solo flight—coverage and background here and here—the Virgin Galactic VSS Enterprise passed another milestone last Friday. The sub-orbital spaceship set a new 14:30 minute record after being dropped by its mothership, gliding over the Mohave Desert while test pilots confirmed that everything was working. This was the spaceship's fifth release, and things continue to progress nicely.

Eventually tests will start to incorporate the craft's space-age hybrid rocket motor, which thus far has only been tested on the ground. Those trials are going to begin over the next few months, with 2012 still the target for when commercial space tourism becomes a reality. By then the New Mexico Spaceport America, being built for both vertical and horizontal takeoffs, will also be ready.

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Mapping the Future Homes of the Four NASA Space Shuttles

Houston is so pissed right now. Why? Because they were passed over in NASA's decision on where to retire the four remaining space shuttles. Instead, four other US cities will welcome different crafts for permanent exhibits, reaping in the tourist dollars that follow anything space travel-related. Let's see who got what, shall we?

· Cape Canaveral, FL: The original home of the shuttles is Kennedy Space Center, so of course they get to keep one. The Space Shuttle Atlantis, which originally launched in 1985 and completed 35 flights, will settle in for posterity at the Visitor Center. Atlantis will fly again before powering down, with a final launch scheduled for June 28.

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Chernobyl is So Hot Right Now: Nuclear Disasters Pique Tourist Interest

On April 26 this year, Ukraine will remember the 25th Anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. No one knows exactly how many died as result of the radioactive fallout and the story of what exactly happened to cause the plant's explosion is so riveting that we can easily get sucked into reading just the Wikipedia page and links for hours. Thus, it's no surprise that Ukraine has opened the Chernobyl site to tours; it's in our nature to be curious about such macabre places.

As it turns out, the recent tourist focus on Chernobyl couldn't have come at a better, if tragic, time. With the situation at Japan's earthquake- and tsunami-damaged nuclear plants (especially Fukushima) having reached frightening disaster status, the public is reading up on nuclear energy and the history thereof, including tragedies like experienced at Chernobyl.

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