On the 6th Feb 2018 SpaceX’s first test launch of the Falcon 9 heavy, the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V, successfully launched the payload of Elon Musks own Cherry Red Telsa roadster, complete with the Starman mannequin, first into orbit and then on to what was meant to …
Buran-Energia : The Soviet Space Shuttle 2.0 on a Moon Rocket
To many the Soviet Space shuttle or Buran was just a copy of the NASA one, it looks surprisingly similar and was meant to do similar things but beyond the looks the two are really quite different, not only in the shuttle vehicles themselves but also the way it got …
Evel Knievel and The Reusable X-3 Volksrocket
In the last year or so, its become almost commonplace to see SpaceX & Blue origin bringing rockets back after a launch for refurbishment and reuse. This has been the goal for billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos backed with NASA knowledge for well over a decade now. But over …
Black Arrow : The Lipstick Rocket – A Very British Space Program
Although it may seem as though it was just a two horse race between the USA and USSR. From the mid-1960s, a small club of nations one by one gained the ability to independently launch satellites using their own rockets and in chronological order, they were the Soviet Union, United …
Project Orion – The Atomic Bomb Powered Space Rocket
If I told that here was a plan to launch a spacecraft the size of an ocean liner, that would weigh 130 times more than the Space Shuttle, could travel with unrivalled speed across our Solar System and was powered by riding on a series pulses created by exploding thousands …
How can you stop a Nuclear Missile ?
When I was growing up in England in the 1970’s and though the 1980’s in particular, there was an almost palpable fear that a nuclear exchange could break out between the superpowers at almost any time. It caused me and many others around at the time to wonder was there …
X-15 The Ultimate Flying Machine
“It was the ultimate flying machine, No aeroplane can live up to what the X-15 did.” That’s what retired test pilot and astronaut Joe Engle said of the first real space plane and 50 years after its record-breaking flight of 3rd October 1967 when USAF test pilot William J. Knight …
The New Space Race to the Moon between NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin
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 …
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 …
Why Russia Did Not Put a Man on the Moon – The Secret Soviet Moon Rocket
It’s probably the most well known peacetime battle between the USA and the Soviet Union, in both technological and ideological terms of the 20th century. Although the USA won the race to the moon, if you’d been a betting person from the mid 1950’s to 1960’s, the chances are that …
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