A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
he Falcon-9 booster returned to a drone ship off the Florida coast just a few minutes after it had sent a Japanese satellite on its way to orbit. It is the second at-sea touchdown for California's SpaceX company, having completed the same task last month. This latest effort was all the more impressive however because the rocket was carrying much more speed when it made its return. SpaceX officials have said that recovering boosters used on missions that orbit geostationary satellites will always be more difficult because of the high velocity required to put those platforms in the right part of the sky. On confirmation of the latest landing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted the joke: "May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar."The primary purpose of the latest Falcon launch was to orbit the JCSAT-14 satellite. This spacecraft will relay telecommunications over the Asia-Pacific region for the Sky Perfect JSAT Corporation. Lift-off from Florida's...