When the chief engineer for the German aero maker Blohm and Voss got hold of a recovered Pratt and Whitney R-2800 and saw that the lapping of the two halves for the crankcase was machined with such great precision that it not only didn’t need a sealing gasket, it also …
How One Camera Changed NASA and How We Saw the World
Without doubt some of the most stunning and famous photos ever taken came from the Apollo missions and without them they wouldn’t have had the same public support or iconic stature that they have today and nearly all of the were taken by one make of camera. But those pictures …
Was the B-29 Superfortress a Failure?
It was the single most expensive military project of world war two costing 50% more than the Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb and is the only aircraft to drop nuclear weapons in combat. The B-29 was the most sophisticated propeller-driven bomber of the world war 2 that …
How Long Could You Survive in a Black Hole?
Imagine we are at some point in future on a mission to study black holes and orbiting near the photon sphere, an area just far enough away where photons of light travel fast enough to settle into an orbit and don’t get pulled into the event horizon. However, through no …
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 …
Bell Labs – The Company that Invented the Future
To some it was the ideas factory, to others it was the most influential institution of its kind in the world and in many ways has created much of the technology that is the bedrock of our modern world. With 9 Nobel prize winners, whose work has been part of …
Ferdinand Porsche – A Man ahead of His Time
Think of the name Porsche and invariably you’ll think of sports cars, the boxter, Taycan and others but ultimately 911, the car which put the modern day Porsche name on the map but the man who founded the brand in 1931 Ferdinand Porsche already had a long and varied history …
How to make Roads with Nukes – Nuclear explosions For Peace
Peaceful nuclear explosions, that sounds like a contradiction in terms, especially in these times of heightened tension and nuclear sabre-rattling. But there was time when back in the 50s, 60s and even up to the late 80s when the explosive power of a nuclear weapon was looked at in a …
Will The Army Get Electric Tanks?
As many will have seen recently and in particular since the rapid rise in petrol and diesel prices, sales of electric cars are booming with year to date sales in 2022 of Battery Electric Vehicles up to 14.4% and if you add plugin hybrids it’s up to 21% in the …
How Do We Know What the Milky Way Really Looks Like?
This is what our galaxy looks like and where we are in it, or so we are told because this is a side on view from what would be about a million light years away. Now clearly we have a problem here because the farthest manmade object capable of taking …