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 …
Interstellar Space Arks – Humanities Exodus From Earth
Earlier this year, Professor Stephen Hawking warned the human race that, unless we found a way to colonise another planet in the next hundred years, we would face a very real threat of extinction. He said: “With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is …
What Happened to the Giant Hovercraft SR-N4? – The Concorde of the Seas
They were once known as the ‘Concorde of the Seas’: mighty flying boats that ferried their passengers with speed and style. Hovercraft were a symbol of national innovation and represented the future of transport in the 20th Century. And yet, like the Concorde, the huge iconic ‘Mountbatten-class’ hovercraft that once …
Zeppelins of Mars – HAVOC on Venus : NASA’s new Planetary Airships
If you thought airships like the Zeppelin were a thing of the past and consigned to the history books for their dangerous ability to burst into flames, then think again because NASA is looking at using them to explore Mars and Venus. On March 21st, 1999, a giant silver …
Project Orion – The Atomic Bomb Powered Space Rocket
If I told that here was a plan to launch a spacecraft the size of an ocean liner, that would weigh 130 times more than the Space Shuttle, could travel with unrivalled speed across our Solar System and was powered by riding on a series pulses created by exploding thousands …
Eclipse – Chasing the Shadow at 50,000 ft | 2017 – 1973
On August 21st 2017, what being dubbed as the “Great American Eclipse” will take place on a path 2680 miles long that goes from the Oregon on the west coast to South Carolina on the east coast and will be the first total eclipse in the US to go coast …
Hubble Trouble – How did the Space Telescope Mirror End Up Flawed ?
In April of 1990 the American Shuttle Discovery launched up from the Earth, into a higher orbit than ever before, to deploy a special payload: the Hubble Space Telescope. Above even the thinnest part of the atmosphere, Hubble would be able to see far-off stars and galaxies without distortion and …