In 1975, the Apollo program ended. Spanning nearly 15 years, from the programs inception in 1961, the final moon landings in 1972, all the way to Apollo Soyuz in 1975, the Apollo program was, at current, the ultimate in exploration, setting distance records, mission duration records (for that time) on Skylab, and of course, it’s […]
On July 8th, 2011, 10:26:46 am Central Time, I watched the end of an era. Somehow, I had managed to miss out on the news that the Shuttle program was coming to an end. Maybe my mind had been other places at the time, but I made sure to watch this launch, because it would […]
May 5th, 1961. 3 Weeks after the successful Soviet flight of Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1, the United States was ready to send it’s first human into space, United States Naval Officer Alan Bartlett Shepard. His flight, designated Mercury-Redstone 3, was intended to prove that a person can survive the stresses associated with the launch […]
The Russian Space Station Mir orbited the Earth from 1986 until 2001. Over that time, it served as ever-expanding space laboratory where research on a wide variety of subjects was conducted. The legacy of the Salyut space station series before it, Mir was designed with multiple berthing ports for expansion modules, allowing for more specialized […]
On April 12th, 1981, 20 years to the day from Yuri Gagarin’s history making Vostok 1 flight came the first flight of the Space Transportation System, more commonly known as the Space Shuttle. It was pure coincidence, as the Shuttle was originally scheduled to fly in 1979, but delay after delay, even up to the […]
The 1980’s looked to be a new era for NASA, and space travel on a whole. After the close of the Apollo program, the United States focused its resources towards a new, reusable spacecraft, to act as a space truck to launch satellites, to carry on scientific research and to eventually build a new space […]
Let’s go back in time 50 years, to January, 1966. It was the middle of the space race, and the United States was halfway through it’s record-setting Gemini Program. After trailing behind the Russians for 8 years, since the launch of Sputnik in 1957, all the way to first Extra-Vehicular Activity on Voskhod 2, in […]
The masses often seem to wonder why we still send humans into space. Some of these people think that no one goes into space anymore, or that NASA stopped existing when the shuttle program was closed in 2011. While this lack of education on space travel is horrific to me, that’s not the point of […]
On November 9, 1967, the most powerful rocket in human history, the Saturn V, roared to life for the first time on a mission to not only test the massive launch vehicle, but to also put the Apollo spacecraft through stress tests simulating the effects of atmospheric entry at the high velocities a craft would […]
On December 24th, 1968, from a distance of over 200,000 miles from Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 decided during their Christmas Eve broadcast to do a reading from the Book of Genesis. To them, this perfectly fit the way the dark and light of the Moon contrasted with the colors of the Earth, and […]
Anyone who knows me knows I love space. Everything about the cosmos, from Sputnik to neutron stars, has caught my attention for as long as I can remember. I’ve always looked up and wondered what it was like to be up there, or what was going on right now in a far off corner of […]