If you’ve bought a new smartphone in the last couple of years you may well have noticed that it’s quite a bit smarter and more capable than models of just a few years earlier. Now some might put it down to the CPUs, memory and general computer hardware becoming faster …
TV From The Moon – Apollo’s Live TV Cameras
The fateful first steps of Neil Armstrong on to the lunar surface and his immortal words, “That’s One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was broadcast to a worldwide audience of about 600 million and yet it was touch and go as to whether it would be …
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 …
MOSFET – The Most significant invention of the 20th Century
What makes a truly world-changing invention?. There are many contenders for the most significant invention of the 20th century, the jet engine, the airplane, television, the internet, the computer and antibiotics are all worthy contenders but unless you live like an 15th-century hermit or a part of an undiscovered tribe, …
America’s Failed High Speed Tilting Train – The UAC Turbotrain
Whilst the US doesn’t spring to mind when you think about high-speed rail, in the late 1960’s it was the first place along with Canada to have a advanced commercial high-speed tilting train service Capable of 170 mph or 274km/h. It was powered by multiple gas turbine engines, built like …
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 …
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 …