Ken Mattingly was a member of the prime crew for Apollo 13. But, he was removed from the crew just days before the flight.
It turns out, astronaut Charles Duke, who was on the backup crew, had caught measles and accidentally exposed the prime crew to the disease. Mattingly was the only member of the prime [...]

Words cannot express how much I admire Buzz Aldrin. But…
He seems to think that America faced a choice of going to the moon or going to Mars, and wisely chose the latter. NASA’s new  course in space is allegedly to spend time and money doing research and finding the best way to send people to [...]

According to the New York Times, the Obama administration’s new budget and plan for NASA outsources manned spaceflight to private companies.
The guys who brought us Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the space shuttle are done designing rockets and spacecraft.
It somehow seems appropriate for this news to come out this last week of January. Because this time [...]

Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 fire 43 years ago today. I can’t help but think that Gus, in particular, would be very unhappy with the state of America’s space program today.
A new committee to plan “the future” of the space program is starting. Previously, another committee put us [...]

I had a correspondence with H. D. McDaniel, a man who worked at the Cape in the early sixties and beyond. He worked in “Launch Sequencing” which is monitoring preparations and activities up to (and including) the launch of a space vehicle.
This is a pretty obscure area. Even as a space buff, I really pay [...]

Konstantin Feoktistov, who was aboard the first multiple-passenger spaceflight—and helped to develop the spacecraft—has died at 83.
Feoktistov helped revise the one-man Vostok spacecraft to fit as many as 3 cosmonauts aboard, as the Voskhod spacecraft did in its initial flight with Feoktistov aboard. He had been dubious about sending the craft up with 3 aboard, [...]

The X-38 was a spacecraft designed to bring crews to the International Space Station. It was an alternative to the Russian Soyuz and a successor to the Shuttle.
It was canceled in 2002.
Now the latest “shuttle successor” is in danger of cancellation…and the X-38 is headed to a museum.
That’s right. A nearly “flight-ready” prototype of a [...]

Noting that the (then) recently completed manned mission around the moon yielded very little valuable information and cost a great deal of money—Werner von Braun wrote that space exploration is still worth it.
Why?
“To say at this time that man in space has made little contribution to scientific knowledge or to economic returns is like saying [...]

Fifty-two years ago today, the Soviet Union send a basketball-sized metal ball into orbit—and changed the planet forever.
Sputnik shocked America and the world. Suddenly, we were in a battle for the “high ground” of space. And we were badly behind. Following the launch of the first-ever satellite, the Soviets expanded their lead.
They sent heavier and [...]

You probably don’t remember the name Pavel Popovich. He was big news in 1962. That’s a long time ago, and more memorable space achievement occurred both before and after his historic flight.
But in August 1962, Popovich piloted the fourth manned Soviet space mission, Vostok 4. The year before, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in [...]