NEWS
November 21, 1991 | LEE DYE, TIMES SCIENCE WRITER
Astronomers reported breathlessly this week that they had discovered a speeding object in space that will pass within 290,000 miles of Earth, but to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, it was all much ado about nothing. There are 100 million objects that pass through the Earth's orbit around the sun every year, and about five a day pass within 290,000 miles of the Earth, said Don Kessler, chief scientist on NASA's program to reduce the amount of debris in Earth orbit.
OPINION
October 4, 2007 | Kevin P. Chilton, Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, the commander of U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, was the commander of Air Force Space Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado from June 2006 until this week.
Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union surprised the world by launching Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite, into orbit. The satellite's unfettered "flight" over our country and around the world brought home the Soviet threat for millions of Americans, and it motivated the United States to regain the technological upper hand through education, advanced science and civilian-military aerospace efforts.
BOOKS
September 2, 1990 | Philip J. Klass, Klass, senior avionics editor for Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine for nearly 35 years and now a contributing editor, is a skeptical UFO investigator. He has authored four books on the subject, including "UFOs: The Public Deceived" (Prometheus Books). and
"This is a true story," former New York Times reporter Howard Blum assures his readers in the opening page of this book. "I verified every name, every incident, date and conversation." The publisher's blurb on the review copy characterizes the book as a "startling expose that reads with the dramatic narrative drive of a novel but . . . it is absolutely true!"
NEWS
January 23, 1988 | ROBERT C. TOTH, Times Staff Writer
As President Reagan prepares to endorse a more ambitious civilian space program, a blue-ribbon government panel on long-term strategy has urged a more aggressive military space effort for the rest of the century to compensate for "our weakness in space." "In a war with the Soviet Union, we cannot count on space being a sanctuary," according to the bipartisan Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, created by the White House and the Pentagon. "More likely it would be a critical battlefield."
NEWS
December 22, 1991 | LEE DYE, TIMES SCIENCE WRITER
The haunting "beep-beep" emitted by a basketball-sized aluminum sphere circling the Earth in the winter of 1957 told a startled America that Sputnik had been launched into orbit and that the Soviets were far more advanced technologically than most had thought. Sputnik and other early Soviet space triumphs rallied a nation to action, and before it would end, Americans--not Soviets--would walk on the surface of the moon.