If an astronaut working on the International Space Station were somehow cut loose from his tether, would he fall back to Earth or orbit around it?
If an astronaut outside the ISS has his or her tether broken, they do not fall to the Earth. Before the tether was broken, the astronaut was in orbit at…
Is Donald Trump as beloved around the world as he is in the US?
I’ve been to about 65 countries and territories around the world (depending on how you count them), and all seven continents over the last several years. I’ve had…
If Japan had destroyed America’s aircraft carriers and oil reserves during Pearl Harbor, could they have won WWII?
No In Fact, I would postulate that Japan would have had it much worse. The U.S. Pacific fleet was moved from California to Pearl Harbor by Roosevelt in…
Escape velocity is supposed to be 24,000 mph, but our rockets never achieve this speed. How does that work?
Imagine you are sitting on a skateboard at the bottom of your drive and you need to get to the top. You could push off your garage door…
Can humans live on the side of a tidally-locked planet where neither day nor night exist?
Humans with their technology developed on Earth could live on a tidally locked planet where neither day nor night exists. We used to think that such planets become…
How did NASA make the shuttle safer after Columbia?
The problem was not just the piece of foam that struck the wing, it was a failure of imagination — NASA had seen foam fall before and decided…
What is the scariest thing you’ve seen a dog do?
This is Kuma. She’s our big bear of a dog – a Caucasian Shepherd. We got her as a guardian for 3 bratty Pomeranians, and she does her…
How will Trump leave office?
I am not a Trump supporter — far from it, in fact. But I will nevertheless be very direct and honest in answering this question: the most likely…
Why do US Air Force fighters like the F-22 and F-15 place the engines right next to each other while Russian fighters like Su-27 always have a gap between the engines?
The United States has this thing where we learn from our mistakes. One of those mistakes was spacing twin engines as far apart as we did in the…
Is Mars too small to have a permanent atmosphere?
No, it is not. It used to have a thick atmosphere, perhaps thicker than Earth’s. It had that atmosphere for a couple of billion years and had oceans….