India’s Next Moon Mission

Today is the anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13, a mission that failed to land on the moon, but is hailed for the ingenious problem-solving abilities of NASA. When there was an explosion aboard a spaceship headed to the moon, we managed to bring the three astronauts home alive. Difficult projects demand superior capabilities [...]

We’re all comfortable using the world wide web nowadays…but why limit it to one world? In a bid to improve communication with (and to) space vehicles, a new internet protocol is being prepared and tested. They’re calling it the interplanetary internet. The formal name is DTN or Delay Tolerant Networking. Although the existing internet technology [...]

Original Mercury astronauts flew solo flights. The early Soviet cosmonauts also went into space alone. Then, after the fatal Soyuz flight of Vladimir Komarov, single passenger flights came to a halt. Bigger spacecraft, bigger crews NASA’s Gemini was a two-man spacecraft. Apollo carried three. And Soyuz, after Soyuz 1, normally carried three cosmonauts. Still, others were [...]