When I was growing up in England in the 1970’s and though the 1980’s in particular, there was an almost palpable fear that a nuclear exchange could break out between the superpowers at almost any time. It caused me and many others around at the time to wonder was there …
What Happened on the Moon Before Apollo ?
The Apollo landings from 1969 to 1972 marked a high point in lunar exploration but Apollo didn’t just rock up on to the moon out of the blue, it took many, many missions by probes and landers over the preceding years to establish if we could send men to the …
XB-70 Valkyrie – The Worlds Fastest Bomber
“That’s not a plane, it’s a 3 plane formation” that’s what General Curtis LeMay said of the plans for the WS-110 supersonic replacement for the B-52 back in 1954. Back in the early 1950s, the B-52 was USAF’s main nuclear delivery platform but with the increasing sophistication of the Soviet …
X-15 The Ultimate Flying Machine
“It was the ultimate flying machine, No aeroplane can live up to what the X-15 did.” That’s what retired test pilot and astronaut Joe Engle said of the first real space plane and 50 years after its record-breaking flight of 3rd October 1967 when USAF test pilot William J. Knight …
Will We Ever Find and Understand Extraterrestrial Messages ?
We have been searching for signs of extra-terrestrial life for the last 50+ years, and so far we have found no evidence of anything beyond our planet. But what are we searching for?. We are framed by our own human expectations, our current technology and understanding of the universe and …
Nuclear powered trains, planes and automobiles
To quote L.P Hartleys 1953 book “The GoBetween”, “The past is a different country, they do things differently there”. That’s definitely something that could be applied our attitude to the newly discovered atomic power in the late 1940’s and 50s. Within just a few years after the first atomic bombs …
The New Space Race to the Moon between NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin
Moon missions are becoming a bit like buses, it seems as though you wait the best part of 50 years for a return trip to the moon, then within a matter weeks, two, turn up at once. This is quickly turning into the new space race but this time it’s …
Nasa’s Million Dollar Space Pen vs The Soviet Pencils
The story of the NASA’s million $ space pen and the soviet pencils has become one of the enduring tales from the space race which still floats around the internet today and goes a bit like this. During the 1960’s as NASA was sending the first men in the space, …
The Biggest Rocket ever Designed? – The Sea Dragon
In the history of space, one rocket stands out as an icon of not only the space race but of the mighty power it symbolised. That one rocket, which is still the Tallest, heaviest and most powerful ever built, was the Saturn V, which was designed to take men to …
How did the Apollo flight computers get men to the moon and back ?
There is much speculation by some, as to how the flight computer aboard the Apollo missions managed to get men to the moon when it had just a tiny fraction of the computing power of something like a modern smartphone. But this is quite misleading as there was not one …