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 …
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Category:Science
The Final Liftoff of Atlantis
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 …
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NROL-37 Launch Highlights And Complete Livestream
Funny how things go, sometimes. The moment I published my previous article on the NROL-37 launch, United Launch Alliance uploaded 2 videos of their own – One being the complete livestream of the mission, and the other being a “Launch Highlights” compilation, capturing the feel of the pre-launch and early boost phases in a very …
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NROL-37 Successfully Launches On A Delta IV Heavy
Ah, the Delta IV Heavy. The most powerful active launch vehicle in the world. While other launch vehicles have surpassed its capacity, few of those actually had successful flights, and regardless of their successes, or lack thereof, none of these top tier boosters are in production anymore. In December 2014, a Delta IV Heavy booster …
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JCSAT-14 Launches Aboard a Falcon 9 with a Successful 1st Stage Landing!
As I type these words, a new Communications satellite, JCSAT-14, is on its way into orbit to provide Japan with more bandwidth for both entertainment broadcasts, and in an emergency, satellite based communications when grown infrastructure may be damaged. The launch vehicle for this payload was the powerful Falcon 9, provide by the commercial spaceflight …
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55 Years Ago, the Flight of Freedom 7
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 …
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Life On The Space Station Mir
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 …
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First Orbit
In 2011, for the 50th Anniversary of Yuri Gagarins flight in Vostok 1, a film, titled First Orbit, was released which told the story of the flight in an incredibly unique way: from the perspective of Gagarin himself. The International Space Station, having a core of Russion components, orbits in the same inclination as Vostok …
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35 Years Ago, Columbia – The First Space Shuttle Flight
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 …
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55 Years Ago, The Flight of Vostok 1
The year was 1961. The Cold war was at it’s peak intensity, and both the Soviet Union and the United States were rushing to prove their technological superiority by putting a human into space. It was 3 years since Sputnik, since Explorer 1, and in that time both United States and Soviet booster, life support, …
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Challenger
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 …
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The Fire of Apollo
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 …
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Worth the Risk
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 …
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Dawn of Orion
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 …
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Apollo 1
Space travel is an incredibly risky business. Sadly, there have been lives lost in the effort to reach the stars. We all know the loss of the Space Shuttles Columbia and Challenger. I remember waking up that morning on February 1st, 2003, the morning after my 18th birthday, to see on the news that Columbia had …
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