During all of the manned Apollo moon missions just one engine was classed as so critical even the most insignificant or minor alterations had to be signed off by the very highest management in NASA. That engine was the lunar ascent engine that lifted the ascent module from the lunar …
The End of the ISS is Coming but Why and What Will Replace it?
So now we know what the fate of the International Space Station will be, around the 2030 mark, SpaceX will de-orbit the ISS and it will burn up in the atmosphere creating the most expensive man-made fireball in history, as about 150 billion dollars of hardware will light up the …
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 many Apollo artifacts should we save?
Back in January 2021, NASA announced that MLP-2, one of the three Mobile launch platforms that carried over fifty Apollo and shuttle missions was being demolished despite its historical importance because NASA quite simply had nowhere to put it. Roll on to May 2023 and NASA announced that MLP-3 which …
ESA’s million-year time machine
This is not a photo of the Milkyway or an artist’s impression, this a map made up of approximately 1.8 billion data points collected by the Gaia satellite, each one not just representing a star but also comets, asteroids and other astronomical objects in the Milkyway and beyond. But its …
Telstar 1 – The Satellite That Changed the World
I may look like a prototype for the Death Star but this 77kg satellite from 60 years ago changed the world in a very much more real way. This is Telstar 1, the world’s first privately funded active communications satellite to be used by public broadcasters to transmit telephone, television …
What does the James Webb Use to See the Universe?
The James Webb space telescope is now at its destination orbit at the L2 LaGrange point and has started its calibration and final tuning using a star in the constellation of Ursa Major named HD84406 which will take about 6 months in all to complete and already the first engineering …
Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes, the story so far…
After 40 million man-hours of work, huge cost overruns and delays which have made the length of time from inception to launch longer than the entire moon program including Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, the James Webb space telescope is almost ready to launch. But even at the last minute, …
What They Really Had Planned for Apollo
We all know what the major goal of the Apollo program was, to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s basically to beat the Soviets and prove that the capitalist system was better than the communist one. But once that’s done what would happen the …
SkyLab – Maybe the Most Important Space Programs So Far.
Think of a long term base in space and everyone thinks of the International Space Station which has been the longest and most successful space program so far. But the hard-learned lessons that have kept the ISS continuously manned for over 20 years came from our very first attempt to …