AirSpaceMag.com

Russia’s first “fifth-generation” fighter made its debut today on a snowy airfield in the country’s far east.

Sukhoi test pilot Sergey Bogdan took the company’s PAK FA prototype aircraft on a 47-minute flight before returning to the factory runway at Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Bogdan reported that the new fighter was “easy and comfortable to pilot,” according to a company press release.

Exactly what constitutes a fifth-generation fighter is open to some interpretation, but the PAK FA now appears to join the U.S. F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter at the forefront of modern military aviation.

Russia Today has video of the first flight, which, despite the title, could hardly have been “Top Secret” if it’s on YouTube.

Meteorite enthusiasts—c’mon, what’s not to love about a meteorite?—are abuzz over the news that the “Lorton meteorite,” which smashed through the roof of a medical office outside Washington, D.C., on January 18, is the chondrite du jour in a controversy over who owns it.

Doctors Marc Gallini and Frank Ciampi, who rent the office space in which the meteorite landed, had planned to donate what Gallini calls “the people’s rock” to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The museum wanted to give the physicians $5,000 for their generous gesture: they would have likely earned a great deal more by selling it on the open market. So the doctors said, okay then, we’ll donate the $5,000 to Haiti earthquake relief.

Win-win? Nuh-uh, say the doctors’ landlords, who claim the law is on their side regarding ownership of space rocks that make it all the way to Earth. The Washington Post reports that “the landlords…were coming to take the stone out of the Smithsonian by sundown,” which evokes images of a stand-off in a Western B-movie.

Remember we told you the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) would be good at spotting near-Earth asteroids?

Well, it is. And it has.

NASA/ JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Here (the red dot at center) is WISE’s first find, a half-mile-wide chunk of rock called 2010 AB78, currently about 98 million miles from Earth. It’s no threat, although astronomers will continue to keep an eye on it.

Speaking of which, the National Academy of Sciences weighed in last week on NASA’s plans to identify potential Earth-crossing space rocks and (possibly) destroy any that pose a danger.

Searching is a choice between money and time, says the Academy. Tracking 90 percent of the objects down to 140 meters in size (which would cause regional damage but only happen on average every 30,000 years) could be done with existing and planned ground-based telescopes, but might take another 20 years. If we’re not comfortable with those odds and want the job done faster, we could build a dedicated space-based telescope. But that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, far more than the $4 million a year NASA currently spends to watch out for asteroids. And nobody’s rushing to increase the space agency’s budget.

What if we were to see a big rock headed straight for us? The Academy’s verdict is sobering. “Unless a large flotilla (100 or more) of massive spacecraft was sent as impactors, nuclear explosions are the only current, practical means for changing the orbit of large [larger than a kilometer] NEOs.” Methods have been proposed to slowly push or pull on an asteroid in order to deflect it from Earth’s path. Unfortunately, we’d need extremely long (multi-decade) warning times to make this happen in the case of large, civilization-threatening objects. And for warning times shorter than a year or two, civil defense (run away!) might be the only practical option.

On August 16, 1960, U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger stepped out of the gondola of a balloon at 102,800 feet above New Mexico wearing a pressure suit. In the thin air, he accelerated to 614 miles an hour in free fall before denser atmosphere slowed his plunge to a speed that allowed him to open a parachute.

Those altitude and speed records, which have stood for a lifetime by some countries’ life expectancy tables, may soon fall.

The challenger, Austrian pilot Felix Baumgartner, announced his project, Red Bull Stratos, in New York last Friday. He plans an attempt to break Kittinger’s record later this year with a jump from a balloon at 120,000 feet. Baumgartner should exceed 690 miles an hour—at more than Mach 1, the first person ever to break the sound barrier in free fall—before parachuting to the ground. His backers Red Bull, Microsoft, Nokia, and Riedel Communications have deep pockets and a history of getting things done, so it would seem that if there’s any chance of breaking Kittinger’s record, which was financed and conducted by the U.S. Air Force, this is it.

Baumgartner (left) and Kittinger, not afraid of heights. (Photo: Red Bull )

No one is bubbling with more excitement than Kittinger, 81. “People have been trying to break my records for fifty years, and many have died in the attempt,” he said Friday on the 40th floor of a New York skyscraper where the project was being unveiled. “But I believe that with our unique assets, an extraordinary mission team, the dedication  of Red Bull, and Baumgartner’s outstanding skills, Reb Bull Stratos will succeed.”

British stuntman Steve Truglia has been saying for years that he’ll be the next daredevil to break Kittinger’s record, along with others including Frenchman Michel Fournier and American Cheryl Stearns. Their attempts have been foiled by lack of finances, good weather, and plain luck.

Baumgartner says it won’t be a breeze. “This is truly a step into the unknown,” he said. “No one can accurately predict how the human body will react in the transition to supersonic speeds. But we’ve got to find out. Future aerospace programs need a way for pilots and astronauts to bail out at high altitude in case of emergency.”

Boeing has released this video of a test conducted at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Alabama last September, during which the ground-based Laser Avenger weapon blew up 50 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of the kind used against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mounted on an armored vehicle, the Laser Avenger already has shown that it can shoot down unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Pentagon is also making headway on its long-proposed Airborne Laser. On January 10, the Missile Defense Agency successfully fired a high-energy laser (below) from a modified Boeing 747-400 freighter against an instrumented rocket launched from San Nicolas Island in California. The laser acquired and tracked the target, but didn’t destroy it. That next step in the research program may happen as early as this week.