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 …
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 …