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 …
How NASA’s New Spacesuit Could Stall the 2024 Artemis Moon Landings.
They are as important as the rockets the astronauts fly in and a miracle of materials and clothing engineering. Without them, we would not have been able to walk on the moon but the current generation of spacesuit’s or Extravehicular Mobility Units which were designed in the late 1970s are …
How Did Apollo Avoid a Radiation Disaster?
Niel Armstrong, the first man on the moon said the thing he feared the most about the Apollo 11 mission was a solar flare, this solar weather is a much an issue for the upcoming Artemis program in 2024 as it was for the Apollo missions, in fact in August …
Space Factories – Building 3D Printed Future SpaceCraft in Space.
While everyone has been wowed in the last couple of years by the new rockets from NASA, blue origin and SpaceX’s Falcons and more recently the tests of their Starship an equally important side to our long term space goals has been going on almost unnoticed. If you’ve ever watched …
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – Eyes on the Moon
With the new goal of NASA to get humans back on to the moon by 2024 with the Artemis program, we are back to a similar situation to when Apollo was getting ready to go to the moon in the 60’s. Basically, we needed to find somewhere to land and …
NASA’s Mega Hubble – The Roman Space Telescope
Space telescopes are expensive things to develop and build and can take years to finish, just look at the James Web Space Telescope, that started development in 1996 for a launch in 2007 on a $500 million budget, its now looking at a launch in 2021 and the budget has …
Could the Crew of Columbia Have Been Rescued?
The Columbia disaster of January 2003 was not only the second total loss of a space shuttle and crew, it also sounded the death knell for the whole space shuttle program. The reason being was that the shuttle had always been a work in progress and that after 31 years …
Will NASA’s Asteroid mission save us in the future? – Project DART
“It’s a 100 per cent certainty we’ll be hit by a devastating asteroid, but we’re not 100 per cent sure when.” That was a statement from the B612 Foundation in April 2018. Now with all our energies seemingly focused on the current biological threat we shouldn’t forget that there are …
How do you Protect Spacecraft from the Radiation of Space?
Although we dream colonising the moon, travelling around the solar system and one day beyond to the stars, space is a dangerous place and not least because of the radiation from our sun and galactic cosmic rays. We only found out about the bands of trapped ionising radiation that surround …