It took just 11 years to go from the first flight of the Lancaster Bomber in 1941 to the first flight of the VX770, the prototype Vulcan bomber in 1952. Yet the difference between them could hardly be greater, the Vulcan along with the Victor and Valiant was a new …
Ultra High Speed Cameras – How do you film a tank shell in flight or a Nuclear bomb test?
In my last video I looked railguns, now whilst I was reviewing the footage I started wondering how they filmed the projectiles in flight. These were not a typical high-speed cameras shots like a bullet hitting a target, for example, these track the projectile from the barrel and down the …
Electromagnetic Railguns – The U.S Military’s future Superguns – 200 mile range Mach 7 projectiles
‘Velocitas Eradico’– sounds like the sort of thing Harry Potter would say when fighting Voldemort, which would be quite apt as the translation of ‘Velocitas Eradico’ is “quickly get rid” or in the vernacular ‘Speed Kills’ and is the motto for the no less futuristic US Navy Electromagnetic Railgun project. …
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 …
Animal Astronauts – The Space Races Unwitting Pioneers
Everyone remembers Yuri Gagarin the first man in space but before his famous flight, there had been many more living space pioneers who didn’t really have any choice about being strapped into an experimental rocket. Animal Astronauts – The Space Race’s Unwitting Pioneers The tidal wave of propaganda generated by Sputnik …
How Did NASA Lose a Mars Space Probe Because of Maths?
For all the knowledge of the thousands of scientists and engineers in the space industry, sometimes the old adage “The best-laid plans of mice and men” can equally be applied to their efforts. This was certainly the case on the Mars Climate Orbiter mission of 1999 and this would go …
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 …
Sputnik – 60 years on from the Start of the Space Race
That simple little beep, beep, beep was the sound that started the Space Race. It was heard for the first time 60 years ago, when, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into a low Earth orbit. It was only a metal ball, 22 inches or about …
Space Station Collision – Mir Crash with Progress Supply Vessel
Of all the 100’s of thousands of pieces of space junk and nearly 1500 satellites in orbit around the earth, it may come as a surprise that so far there has been only one major collision involving a manned craft and it affected both Russians and Americans. After the Apollo …
How the First Spacewalk Nearly Ended in Disaster – Alexei Leonov Voskhod 2
When Alexey Leonov made the world’s first spacewalk in 1965, it was hailed as yet another great success for the USSR in the space race against America. It was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that the west found out that while it may well have been made …