AirSpaceMag.com

This line from a recent NASA Inspector General report jumped out at me:

In addition to managing Shuttle funding challenges, the transition and retirement activities associated with the end of the Shuttle Program present one of the largest such efforts ever undertaken by NASA. The Shuttle Program is spread across hundreds of locations, occupies over 654 facilities, and involves more than 1.2 million line items of personal property with a total equipment acquisition value exceeding $12 billion.

Are the United States Air Force Thunderbirds offering a new “low show” when cloud cover is below minimums?

We contacted the demonstration squadron and asked. Their reply: “Thank you for your interest in the USAF Thunderbirds and for taking the time to send this video to us. We do not have an official relationship with this group though this little event did take place during our airshow in Japan while we were there as part of our 2009 Far East Tour.”

We watched the video for the whole six minutes waiting for a barrel roll or a loop. No love, but we got six minutes of AC/DC.

Here’s some interesting video taken by a passenger aboard the Quantas A380 that had a Trent 900 engine blow shortly after taking off on a flight from Singapore to Sydney on November 4:

And later, the landing:

It turns out that Rolls-Royce, maker of the Trent 900, had been quietly modifying a problem section on newer models of the engine months before this unmodified one suffered the failure seen in the videos.

Now Quantas is looking at replacing 40 of the older engines on the double. After the airline’s six A380s have spent almost three weeks grounded, two are going back into service. When big , expensive airplanes get grounded, their financing commitments don’t follow, which creates some serious drag on an airline’s revenue—the situation is costing Quantas a million dollars a day, some of which they plan to recover from Rolls-Royce.

The engine maker has no shortage of headaches, as its Trent 1000 engine, which powers the Boeing 787, has been experiencing its own teething problems.

But Quantas, Rolls-Royce, and Airbus might have been faced with bigger headaches if there hadn’t been—by chance—five pilots on the A380′s flight deck that day.

Update: Successful launch! Follow the mission’s progress on Twitter.

In this season of solar sailing (Japan’s IKAROS is still going strong), another ship is about to leave the harbor.

NASA’s modest solar sail demonstrator, Nanosail-D, is due to launch tonight on a Minotaur 4 rocket from Alaska. You can watch Spaceflight Now’s live feed from the Kodiak Launch Complex. Liftoff is scheduled for 8:24 p.m. Eastern time.

Nanosail-D is just one of more than a dozen experiments and technology demos onboard the Minotaur, and will be NASA’s first orbital deployment of a solar sail.

It’s more an experiment in packaging than propulsion. The Nanosail engineers want to see if the sail can deploy cleanly from its shoebox-size container. If it does, it won’t do much actual sailing; there’s still enough atmosphere in its low orbit to exert drag on the thin material.

Read about the project here. This video shows how the sail will unfold:

Tony Cenicola/New York Times

Today’s New York Times dining section features the Perfect Roast Timer, by Kikkerland in SoHo. Florence Fabricant writes “Just when I thought the chicken should be ready…the legs of the timer whipped straight up from horizontal to vertical.”

Scaled Composites

In case there is any doubt that the Perfect Roast Timer was inspired by Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, the wings of which pivot up into a high-drag configuration for a stable reentry, Fabricant goes on to say, “The timers are silicon and can be used in ovens as hot as 450 degrees.”