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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

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Valerian Wall at Niche Hotel in Athens,...

May 26, 2020

Several fortification walls protected Athens beginning in ancient times. The Themistoclean Wall was built in 479 B.C., and served as the city’s main line of defense for many years. The Protocheisma, built in 338 B.C., and the Diateichisma, built in 280 B.C., were additional walls built in strategic areas as a second line of defense. While Athenians repaired the Themistoclean Wall, Protocheisma and Diateichisma in 260, they also built the Valerian Wall as an additional fortification to protect the...

Bolghar in Spassky District, Russia

May 26, 2020

Roughly 130 kilometers (80 miles) south of Kazan, the archaeological complex of Bolghar lies on the shore of the Volga River, not far from its modern descendant, Bolgar. Evidence shows that Bolghar, the capital of Volga Bulgaria was established in the early Middle Ages. The capital was eventually moved to Bilyar. After the Mongols invaded in the early 13th century, Bolghar became the Golden Horde’s capital. Under the reign of Berke, the Bulgars of the area converted to Islam....

After 9 Years Abroad, Astronaut Launches Are...

May 25, 2020

For those of us of a certain era, Cape Canaveral evokes thundering, historic liftoffs of rockets into space. The Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon, in 1969. The dawn of the space-shuttle age with the launch of Columbia, in 1981. And the subsequent end of that era, in 2011, when NASA retired the shuttle program and started sending astronauts to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the former Soviet Union, for rides aboard Soyuz spacecraft. If...

Eremo di San Michele Arcangelo (Hermitage of...

May 25, 2020

A winding trail in Italy‘s Aurunci Mountains leads to a in a cave just under the Redentore peak, located at 1,160 meters (3,800 feet) above sea level. Inside the cave is Eremo di San Michele Arcangelo, beautiful hermitage that dates back to the ninth century. The Aurunci Mountains are dry and bare on the side that faces the Mediterranean. On a clear day, when they are not covered in mist, one can see the Pontine Islands and the Island of Ischia...

Ruins of Sauran in Sauran, Kazakhstan

May 25, 2020

Located in what is now South Kazakhstan, Sauran may have been originally settled as early as the seventh century. By the 10th century it was a flourishing metropolis, described by the medieval geographer Al-Maqdisi as a “large city surrounded by seven walls.” Archeologists were puzzled when they failed to find the seven walls in these ruins, until they found another nearby site and realized that the city moved sometime in the 12th or 13th century. No one knows why the city was moved. Some...

Around the World in Things You Can’t...

May 25, 2020

A symbol used to represent something powerful or influential—a person, a sports team, a religion—also makes itself vulnerable to destruction. It isn’t easy to, say, destroy a country, but you can destroy a symbol of that country fairly easily, and there’s no symbol more identified with a nation, and thus more commonly destroyed in protest, than a national flag. In the United States, the Supreme Court has been clear and consistent in the opinion that the desecration of the...

Keramat Bukit Kasita in Singapore

May 25, 2020

It is hard to imagine Singapore before its modern founding by Stamford Raffles of the East India Company in 1819, even with full knowledge of its earlier history. This cluster of keramats, Muslim saintly shrines infused with the religious practices of the Malay world, provides an intriguing window into Singapore’s pre-British history. Thought to be built around the 16th century (though there are opinions against this), the oldest grave reportedly dates to 1721, and burials continued up to early in the...

First Roma Stolpersteine in Slatina, Czechia

May 25, 2020

Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” dot the streets and sidewalks of cities across Czechia, their brassy sheen occasionally catching the light and piquing the curiosity of a passing pedestrian. The small plaques commemorating victims of the Holocaust are inscribed with the names of those killed, holding them forever in the public’s consciousness. In the eastern district of Brno, however, you’ll have to head down a winding, pedestrian street to find the unassuming spot on the sidewalk where two stolpersteine sit,...

La Conquistadora, Our Lady of Conquering Love...

May 25, 2020

Perched in a high, gilded niche in the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a 30-inch-tall wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. She is called La Conquistadora, Our Lady of Conquering Love. The religious icon is believed to be the oldest continuously worshipped Virgin Mary likeness in the United States. The statue is hand-carved from willow and European olive wood. Tree-ring dating performed by the University of Arizona dates her...

National Sprint Car Hall of Fame &...

May 25, 2020

Next to historic Knoxville Raceway is the only museum in existence dedicated to the history of one of racing’s most unique, raw, and undiscovered sectors: sprint cars. Non-winged sprint cars first came around in the 1930s and 1940s and were the predecessor of today’s Indycar. Today, most sprint cars have wings on top to add downward pressure to give the car more traction, which makes the cars faster and easier to control. Imagine the races without them. The National...

China’s Water Forests Bring an Artificial Order...

May 25, 2020

The tufted, velvety green surface looks like a chenille pillow. Upon closer inspection, there are flecks of bright color embedded among the rows of green. The colorful bit are tourist boats leisurely meandering through waterways created by the neat rows of trees at Luyang Lake Wetlands Park in Yangzhou, in the Jiangsu province of China, one of many artificial “water forests” that now dot the country. This bird’s eye view obscures the towering scale of the pond cypress, bald...

Silver Springs Filling Station in Landrum, South...

May 23, 2020

Cross the border from North Carolina to South Carolina on Highway 176 and you will stumble across a retro replica of an Esso station named “Silver Springs Filling Station.” It has a traditional 1930s Wayne gravity-powered gasoline pump and a kerosene barrel as well. There is an outhouse back behind the building to complete the recreation. Standard Oil was broken up into dozens of companies in 1911. Standard Oil of New Jersey had control over New Jersey, Maryland, West...

Birthing Figure in Washington, D.C.

May 23, 2020

In addition to its beautiful gardens, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., houses an impressive collections of Byzantine and pre-Columbian artifacts. It is also home to a fertility idol known as the Birthing Figure (sometimes the Dumbarton Oaks Birthing Figure), which may be familiar to fans of Indiana Jones. Carved out of scapolite and measuring about 20 centimeters (8 inches) in height, the idol depicts a squatting woman in the middle of childbirth. The sculpture was considered to be of Aztec...

Via Flacca Ruins in Sperlonga, Italy

May 23, 2020

Now that they have been swallowed by landslides and vegetation, the supporting structures of the once-spectacular Via Flacca are nearly unnoticeable. This ancient Roman road was built by the censor Lucius Valerius Flaccus in the second century B.C. As the nearby Villa of Tiberius shows, the coastline was a popular site for the wealthy to build their seaside villas. The road also provided an alternative route to pass the rugged coastline and the Aurunci mountains, connecting Sperlonga to the...

The Things Inside This 105-Year-Old Time Capsule...

May 22, 2020

Tim Frank was stressed out. Once conservators pried the time capsule open, he feared, they might find a mangled mess: a tattered flag, shredded papers, and a rollicking party of flies or silverfish. “My heart was racing through the whole thing,” he says. Frank is a historian at Arlington National Cemetery, the military burial ground in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. On October 13, 1915, when construction was beginning on the Memorial Amphitheater, a memorabilia box was sunk behind...

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