northrop grumman

A future trip to the moon could use a commercial vehicle, if Armadillo Aerospace has anything to say about it. The company's rocket-powered craft pulled off a mock lunar landing on Saturday to qualify for a $1 million purse from NASA's Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.

In the 1960 cartoon "Hits and Missiles," Popeye the Sailor Man accidentally crashes a rocket into a moon made of cheese.

Popeye soon realizes he needs more fuel, "so we can gets back to Oyth," and he goes looking for help.

When a group of NASA scientists deliberately crashes a rocket into the moon this summer, they'll be looking for fuel, too -- in a way.

That tiny speck in the distance is Armadillo Aerospace's MOD 1 aircraft, right before not quite winning the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge at the X Prize Cup in Alamogordo, New Mexico on Saturday. To win Level One, the lander has to rise up to 150 feet in the air, hover for 90 seconds and land on a pad 100 meters away. Then it has to do the same thing in reverse. MOD 1 nailed the first part, but failed in the final stretch of its reverse trip. A nozzle failure knocked the lander off balance with only seven seconds to go, causing it to miss the landing pad. As a result, the $350,000 prize is still unclaimed. —Seth Fletcher

Update: Sunday morning's attempt failed, too, again on the reverse trip. Sounds like the problem this time was a crack in the MOD 1's engine—MOD 1's new engine, which the Armadillo team installed after yesterday's failed try. Word is they'll try it Level One again this afternoon.

Another update: No dice for Armadillo this year. Their afternoon attempt failed; there was talk earlier today of a possible third attempt this evening, but according to an X Prize spokesperson, Armadillo founder John Carmack decided against it. That means it'll be this time next year, at the earliest, before anyone wins the prize.

Sounds too futuristic to be true? See below for a video of the Skyguard system taking out mortar rounds, artillery shells and rockets

The Wirefly X Prize Cup was a three-ring circus of space-related entertainment for the thousands of spectators who filed in to experience rocket launches and flight simulations, meet astronauts and tech dignitaries, and watch teams of engineers vie for $2 million in NASA-sponsored prize money. But although the action was brisk, all three of the NASA prizesthe $200,000 Climber Challenge, the $200,000 Tether Challenge and the $2-million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challengewent unwon over the course of the weekend.

Who leaked the new name of the spaceship NASA plans to fly to the moon by 2020? It wasn't Jeffrey Williams, a flight engineer living aboard the International Space Station. Sure, Williams taped a video message in which he held up a model of the spacecraft. Weve been calling it the crew exploration vehicle for several years, but today it has a name…Orion, he said.

Aerospace engineer David Graham and his three colleagues had a deadline, and a little brown tortoise was putting it in jeopardy. In a few hours, as the sun rose over the Mojave Desert on an August morning last year, two Northrop Grumman F-5E fighter jets would come racing over the horizon. Flying 30,000 feet above Harper Dry Lake and traveling at 920 mph, the airplanes would be trailing long sonic boomsthe distinctive aural signatures of supersonic flight that ordinarily make high-speed passages over land impossible.

Air travelers alarmed by the recent terrorist attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner have no reason to stop worrying. Little is likely to be done to reduce the threat.

When a Concorde jet on its way from Paris to New York crashed on July 25, 2000, killing all 109 people aboard and four on the ground, the event was not simply a tragedy -- it seemed a metaphor for the sorry state of supersonic air travel.