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 …
RB.211- The Engine That Sank and Then Saved Rolls Royce
When Rolls Royce went into receivership in 1971, it was like a hammer blow to british industry and was almost as unthinkable as the fall of the monarchy or the Chruch of England, and yet one single project caused more damage than the combined forces Hilter and the Luftwaffe in …
The Legendary Napier Deltic – Super Diesel Triangle Engine
As I did the video for the Rolls Rolls Crecy engine a short while back it reminded me about another equally eccentric British engine that not only made the Crecy look simple by comparison, it was the most powerful high-speed diesel engine for its weight and size at the time …
The Wild Weasels – When Electronic Warfare Became Real
They had probably the most dangerous missions in the USAF and were the first into an air attack and the last out and had a greater number of losses during the early part of the Vietnam war for their squadron size than any others. But they developed a technique to …
Concorde’s Overture. Will We Have a New Supersonic Jet Soon? – Boom SuperSonic
1969 was a good year for technological advancements in both aerospace and space. On July 20th 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and promised to open the door to our exploration of not only the moon but also the solar system and just a few months earlier Concorde made …
Rolls Royce Crecy – The Most Advanced Piston Aero Engine Never Made.
We are all aware of the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, the driving force behind so many of the most important aircraft of world war two like the Spitfire, Mustang, Hurricane, Mosquito and Lancaster to name just a few. But behind the scenes, another Roll Royce engine was poised to take …
Proximity Fuze – The 3rd Most Crucial Development of WW2
In the realms of top-secret projects of world war 2 there are a couple which most people will have heard of, the development of the Atomic bomb and Radar but there was another that was ranked as equally secret and important and its effect on the war could be said …
Lockheed U-2 | Why Is It Still Flying & Still Spying 65 Years On?
We’ve looked at a couple of iconic planes on this channel recently that seem destined to keep flying long past their original design life including the Boeing B-52 and the Lockheed C-5 but there is one more that you would have thought that would have been made redundant long ago …
Aerotrains – The Forgotten Train Experiments
Planes, trains and automobiles, well if we leave out the automobiles, we’ve seen a few variations on the theme of how trains have been powered from steam, to diesel and now electric but there was a time when several experimental trains used engines from planes as there main propulsion, so …