Moon missions are becoming a bit like buses, it seems as though you wait the best part of 50 years for a return trip to the moon, then within a matter weeks, two, turn up at once. This is quickly turning into the new space race but this time it’s …
Nasa’s Million Dollar Space Pen vs The Soviet Pencils
The story of the NASA’s million $ space pen and the soviet pencils has become one of the enduring tales from the space race which still floats around the internet today and goes a bit like this. During the 1960’s as NASA was sending the first men in the space, …
The Biggest Rocket ever Designed? – The Sea Dragon
In the history of space, one rocket stands out as an icon of not only the space race but of the mighty power it symbolised. That one rocket, which is still the Tallest, heaviest and most powerful ever built, was the Saturn V, which was designed to take men to …
How did the Apollo flight computers get men to the moon and back ?
There is much speculation by some, as to how the flight computer aboard the Apollo missions managed to get men to the moon when it had just a tiny fraction of the computing power of something like a modern smartphone. But this is quite misleading as there was not one …
What if Apollo had crashed on the Moon ?
For all of the celebrations surrounding the first manned lunar landing of Apollo 11 in 1969, what is forgotten today is just how close they and the other Apollo missions flew to the edge of disaster. Apollo 11 came within seconds of aborting the landing because they had over shot …
A day in the life of the human race
In a normal average day, for the vast majority of us, not a lot happens. You get up, go to work, come home, watch the TV, browse the net, maybe go out then it’s back home and bed. However, there 7.5 billion of us, so during a normal average day …
Are you, really you ?
The painting “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” by Pablo Picasso became the most expensive in the world when it sold for $106M at Christie’s in New York in 2010. However, if you had a copy, a fake, one that looked identical but was not the original, it would be worth …
What if time did not exist ?
What would happen, if one day you woke up and time no longer existed?, I’m not talking about stopping time or what we may think is the definition of time. I mean no time, no flow from past to present to future, no entropy, just now. No clocks or calendars, …
Why is the Sun hot ?
Why is the sun hot?, now before you jump on the comments and say “because it’s the sun, stupid” think about it, our sun is basically a giant nuclear reactor at the centre of our solar system but not like the ones on earth. They create energy by nuclear fission, …
Why can’t we fly a plane into space ?
Why can’t we fly a plane into space, what stops it from just flying higher and higher until we are in space? Well, there a several issues but assuming we are in something like a normal jet airliner, then one of the main problems is the air or lack of …