Crossing my news feed a few days ago is something rather interesting to me – An Atari 2700 console that was found in a thrift store in California… for $30! Yeah, if you know the story of the 2700, it’s amazing to read about. If you don’t, well, let me explain it to you. The […]
48 years ago today on July 24th, 1969, Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific ocean after successfully landing on the Moon. This completed the nations commitment to “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the end of the decade, and showed to the world that our combined […]
Here we have a film from the earlier days of Apollo. More correctly, early 1964, after Mercury but before Gemini, we had this historic test of a Saturn 1 vehicle with the first live upper stage. To put this in perspective, when this rocket system, SA-105, was launched and successfully orbited, the S-IV upper stage […]
This footage, taken from the interview shared in the previous article, is a combination of modern Lunar imagery of the Apollo 11 landing site matched up with the footage from the camera onboard the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. I had previously found the combined videos, but I had not seen until yesterday this version with […]
UPDATE: I’m aware the video is no longer available. I will be looking for an alternateive source. If I do not find one, this article will stay in this state until such a time as I do. 48 Years ago today, on July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon as […]
This film is a quick, 6 minute look at the navigation and guidance systems of the Apollo spacecraft. Something I noticed is that the film is dated to 1966, but uses footage from what is clearly the Apollo 6 mission, an unmanned Saturn V launch in April of 1968 – my best guess is this […]
July 16th, 1969, the day 48 years ago that a Saturn V rocket launched carrying Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin into Earth orbit, and then beyond it towards the first attempted landing on the Moon. That landing of course would be successful on July 20th, 1969. Give that it’s a Sunday and an […]
This film just got uploaded to YouTube by regular historic footage source Jeff Quitney, and what a film it is! A very to-the-point 10 minute or so film about a B-52 Stratofortress which lost it’s fail fin during a test flight over Colorado! Now, under most circumstances, an aircraft without a tail fin would lose […]
Project Mercury was the United States first manned space flight program. This film gives a good overview of the Mercurty Spacecraft, it’s launch into orbit on an Atlas Missile, and the training of the Mercury 7 Astronauts for the stresses and demanding requirements of space flight. As it would happen, Project Mercury would have 6 […]
When computers as we think of them today (microcomputers, as the terminology of the day would name them) were introduced, one of the most critical uses of them, and certainly the one most people took to the easiest, was typing out documents. Be it something for a business, a letter to a friend, writing the […]
6 Years ago today, the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle program. I wrote an entry last year, but incidentally, for whatever reason, didn’t include launch video. No idea why, but I’m rectifying that now. The Final Liftoff of Atlantis The Space Shuttle is the most-flown American manned […]
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 […]
When both the NES Classic Edition and now the SNES Classic Edition were announced, a common comment from many in the gaming scene were that these mini-consoles were pointless, or some kind of similar lack of understanding why people are fascinated by them. This stems from a misconception of the very target demographic these machines […]
In a little bit of news that has the geekier side of the internet smiling, the .gif file format turns 30 today, June 15th, 2017. Yep, the same file format that beings you all those horribly annoying 1 second long looping animations on every buzzfeed top 10 list, the file format that no one wants […]
Considering today is June 6th, the 73rd Anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Nazi Occupied Europe, I think it would be a fine day to share a few World War 2 related informational videos; in this case, a film showing the process of how bombs are loaded onto a B-17 bomber. I never thought there […]