As we advance our technology ever forward you would think that re-making a 50-year-old design should be easy but things are not quite as simple as they seem. When the Space Launch System or SLS was in development, NASA ran the advanced Booster competition to find a new booster system …
How The Real Soviet Rocketmen Changed the World
Its said that around 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project to land a man on the moon and apart from the astronauts themselves, how many people spring to mind when you think about the who designed and oversaw its construction and operation, With the exception of Werner Von Braun, …
Aerospike Engines – Why Aren’t We Using them Now?
Ever since the earliest rockets, we’ve seen them working with a bell-shaped nozzle from the First German V2 rockets right up to the SpaceX falcon heavy but their ubiquity doesn’t mean that they are the best way to do things, in fact, they have a major drawback which is one …
Why is NASA so Slow ?
Each generation reinvents space as the cosmic frontier: in the age of Gagarin and Shepard, test pilots grinned at the TV cameras to prove they were made from ‘The Right Stuff’. And in 2018 orbital space is becoming a playground for billionaire entrepreneurs, turning their childhood dreams into reality. In …
Reusable Rockets & Flyback boosters
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVNIaC10MDg[/embedyt] One of the most impressive sights of recent years was the synchronised landing of the falcon heavy booster rockets, and although the centre core didn’t make it back simply because it didn’t have enough ignition fluid to restart all of the three of the centre cores engines …
How NASA Filmed Apollo, the Shuttle and Other Launches
These are some of the iconic pieces of launch footage from the space race and the shuttle program, shots taken that would impossible for any human to see up close and personal and many of these were done long before we had miniature high definition cameras and high-speed data …
Nuclear Rockets for Mars and Beyond
On the 6th Feb 2018 SpaceX’s first test launch of the Falcon 9 heavy, the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V, successfully launched the payload of Elon Musks own Cherry Red Telsa roadster, complete with the Starman mannequin, first into orbit and then on to what was meant to …
Buran-Energia : The Soviet Space Shuttle 2.0 on a Moon Rocket
To many the Soviet Space shuttle or Buran was just a copy of the NASA one, it looks surprisingly similar and was meant to do similar things but beyond the looks the two are really quite different, not only in the shuttle vehicles themselves but also the way it got …
Evel Knievel and The Reusable X-3 Volksrocket
In the last year or so, its become almost commonplace to see SpaceX & Blue origin bringing rockets back after a launch for refurbishment and reuse. This has been the goal for billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos backed with NASA knowledge for well over a decade now. But over …
Black Arrow : The Lipstick Rocket – A Very British Space Program
Although it may seem as though it was just a two horse race between the USA and USSR. From the mid-1960s, a small club of nations one by one gained the ability to independently launch satellites using their own rockets and in chronological order, they were the Soviet Union, United …