It’s the 4th of July tomorrow and, being quite honest, I had nothing quite planned to write today or tomorrow. However, to keep up with the spirit of Xadara, my love of space, and in a classic “Happy Birthday America” bit of patriotism, I’ve decided to just flood you with some random rocket launches in […]
On May 18th, 1969, John Young, Tom Stafford, and Gene Cernan began an 8 day mission that would act as a “dress rehearsal” for the planned manned landing on the Moon of Apollo 11. This flight was the 2nd of 4 that would be launched in 1969, and would serve to test the Lunar Module […]
Here we have a quick, 5 minute film clip from 1966, produced by NASA to provide a status update on the Apollo Program. In 1966, as you may recall, we were finishing up the Gemini Program, and the Saturn V rocket was nearing testing completion for it’s first flight, in late 1967, as a test […]
45 years ago this past month, from April 16th to April 27th of 1972, the Apollo 16 mission went to, and returned from, the Moon on our 5th successful lunar landing mission. This film goes over the mission in detail, going over key points of the mission and the unique events that happened during the […]
The ill-fated Apollo 13 missions launched on this day, April 11th, 47 years ago today in the year 1970. The mission was famously portrayed in the 1995 film Apollo 13 which, while somewhat inaccurate on many elements, and slightly altered for the sake of drama, still told the story well enough for most people to […]
2017 marks 50 years since the first flight of the Saturn V rocket, the booster which not only helped put humans on the Moon (6 times) but also put America’s first (and only) space station, Skylab, into orbit. In use for only 6 years, the Saturn V launched a total of 13 times, performing it’s […]
No, I still can’t get past the insanity a few weeks ago on YouTube when I brought up the fact that the SpaceX booster has a large number of engines, and that increases the chance for something to go catastrophically wrong. To recap, not only did people get mad at me over even daring to […]
In 1966, as Project Gemini was wrapping up, Project Apollo was starting to, quite literally, get off the ground – Complete Apollo CSM’s began unmanned flights, and the Lunar Module, while delayed quite a bit, was still starting to become a real machine. Everything was looking to be progressing smoothly before the Apollo 1 fire […]
If you’re going to the moon, you’re going to need a rocket. A big one. Actually, scratch that, you’re going to need several rockets of varying types, uses, and fuels. This film, produced during the late stages of the design and testing of the rocket systems of the Saturn V and the Apollo Command, Service, […]
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 […]
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 […]