If you have seen any of the Apollo launch videos or even the new Artemis launch videos you will no doubt be familiar with the shot of the massive five F1 engine’s at launch on the Saturn 5 or the four RS-25 engines and boosters on the SLS rocket as …
Why Aren’t Swing Wing Aircraft Made Any More?
From around the mid 1960s, a new type of aircraft led the way in introducing new multi role fighters and bombers both in the United States and in the Soviet Union and then Europe. This hybrid style of aircraft looked to combine the low-speed flexibility and efficient cruise of straight-wing …
F-111 Aardvark, The Aircraft that Defined an Era
During the Vietnam war, one aircraft suffered the least amount of damage, even though it had been on some 4000 combat sorties, only six of them were lost to enemy action. That aircraft was the F-111 aardvark, a swing wing, medium range multi role combat aircraft which started in service …
Zoom Climbs – The Highest Life and Death Jet Flights to the Edge of Space.
On the 31st of August 1977, Aleksandr Fedotov, flying a modified MiG-25RB with the more powerful Tumansky R-15BF2-300 engine’s, reached the record height of 123,523 feet or 37,649m and that record still stands today. This marked the end Of the Super high altitude zoom climbs, a golden age of altitude …
B-58 Hustler – Was it Really That Bad?
During the early days of the Cold War the U.S needed bombers that would be capable of flying from the US mainland all the way to the Soviet Union, quickly and avoiding enemy air defences by flying higher than the Soviet fighters or missiles could reach. Two bombers emerged that …
Why is it Still So Hard to Land on the Moon?
How hard can it be to safely land on the moon? after all, it’s not like we haven’t done it before. Since 2013 there have been at least nine attempts at a soft landing on the moon by China, India, Japan, Israel as well as the US and Russia, if …
How Big Tech is Controlling Your Life
Resistance is futile, your life as it has been is over, from this time forward, you will service us. There is a saying, that you may well know and although not technically correct goes along these lines. If you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will …
Is Your Private Internet Data Being Harvested From Undersea Cables?
99% of all the internet traffic and most probably the video you are watching now has traveled over an undersea cable somewhere along the route. It is estimated that the finance sector alone sends some $10 trillion dollars per day of financial transactions over these cables. And as a whole …
What Would Happen if you fell into a Black Hole?
Imagine we are at some point in future on a mission to study black holes and orbiting near the photon sphere, an area just far enough away where photons of light travel fast enough to settle into an orbit and don’t get pulled into the event horizon. However, through no …
How The MIT Ideas Factory Revolutionised the Future
It’s said that if the combined income of all the 120,000 MIT alumni, living and dead, were put together it would be equal to the 10th largest economy in the world, which as of today is Canada at about $2.2 trillion. I did a video about Bell Labs a while …