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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]