With the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 coming up is easy to forget that the whole Apollo program was a ground-breaking succession of technologies but one was essential to literally get things off the ground. The Rocketdyne F1 engines would be the biggest, most powerful single-chamber rocket engines ever built …
What Happened to NASA’s Gateway to Space – Launch Complex 39
They were seen on the most significant missions like Apollo, Skylab, the Space shuttle, they’ve been used for the SpaceX Falcon Heavy and they’ll be there on the upcoming SLS missions but they are hardly ever talked and without them, we simply wouldn’t be able to get the rockets off …
How Dangerous are Jet Contrails & Rocket Exhaust ?
The sight of contrails above us in the skies is a common one, especially in the developed world since the advent of the jet engine and at around same time we have had a much less prevalent but equally potent kind of exhaust from rocket engines but just how dangerous …
Why Can’t we Remake the Rocketdyne F1 Engine?
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 …