There’s nothing I’d rather see than a NASA built Orion spacecraft take astronauts beyond earth orbit. They could go to an asteroid, to Mars, wherever. But NASA would be breaking new...
What’s With Orion?
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Private cargo ship to visit IS...
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Rockets blow up.
3Posted by Ray Katz
Constellation reborn
The planned successor to the shuttle program was dead. But it didn’t stay dead. Constellation, a program to return to the moon and go to Mars using a spacecraft called Orion and a booster called Ares, was criticized as too expensive and plagued with technical problems. So, the program was ended. But a few weeks back, the Orion spacecraft was revived (albeit the name was...
Read MorePosted by Ray Katz
Spaceflight around the web
What’s going on up there? Here’s a roundup of what’s being reported about spaceflight right now… We already reported about the Mercury Messenger spacecraft (and it’s 1970s predecessor). But now there’s more, including how Mercury (strangely) resembles Saturn! Iran, which has successfully launched a satellite into orbit, and sent up some small...
Read MorePosted by Ray Katz
Humphrey and NASA
Today is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hubert H. Humphrey. If you...
Posted by Ray Katz
NASA picks “Orion-like” ...
Lockeed-Martin has been selected to design and build a new manned spacecraft....
Posted by Ray Katz
Finding a heavy lift vehicle.
Congress really wants a heavy lift vehicle. And they want it fast. Or maybe...
Posted by Ray Katz
Yuri Gagarin
April 12, 1961. Exactly 100 years after shots were fired at Fort Sumter,...
Posted by Ray Katz
Spacecraft Orion: what’s it fo...
The long-awaited Orion spacecraft has been unveiled by Lockheed Martin. The...
Posted by Ray Katz
Mariner 10 got to Mercury first.
Exploration of Mercury didn’t begin with the recent success of the...
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Random Posts
Russia to shoot for the moon—maybe this time?
When the Soviet N1 rocket failed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that ended any hope of getting Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov to the moon. They’d hoped to beat the Americans in the race to the moon…but failed to get there ever. Even as a runner up. Even now, for a price tag of $100 [...]
Von Braun: Why send people into space?
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 [...]
Roving the Moon in Style.
I wouldn’t expect anything about space exploration in the style section of the NY Times magazine…but the unexpected happened. There’s an article about designing in new-generation roving vehicle for future astronauts to get around on the moon…allowing them do better than just survive. The plan is to make them stylish and comfortable as well, with [...]
