April 12th, 2011
Fifty years after the first man went to space, our space program is in a state of flux. We are closing in on the final missions of the space shuttle era and funding remains in limbo for NASA’s new space capsule and heavy lift rocket. Where will the impetus to invest in exploration come from?
The private sector’s answer is to race to put rich people in space. Just two weeks ago, Richard Branson unveiled Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo that will take anyone willing to pay $200,000 into suborbital space.
Will Branson’s version of space tourism become the norm of space travel and what would be implications to governmental space travel? Space.com looks forward to 2061.
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April 12th, 2011
[Photo courtesy of National Geographic]
Fifty years ago today, Yuri Gagarin boarded Vostok 1 and became the first man to break the chains of gravity and explore the unknown of space.
During the height of the Cold War, this achievement was not celebrated as the triumph of humanity that it should have been. Unfortunately, fear of Soviet technological supremacy and the possible military implications of successful manned space flight clouded our view of Gagarin’s mission.
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March 25th, 2011
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December 18th, 2010
I. WANT. TO. DO. THIS. NOW!!!!!
Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.
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September 28th, 2010
The new Mars rover, Curiosity, is scheduled to land on the Red Planet in 2012 and Space.com has the lowdown on her capabilities. Sounds pretty cool. Doctor Emmett Brown, however, was less than impressed by its choice of power supply….plutonium. His reaction can be seen here.
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August 25th, 2010
The rocket is named HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE, and its first test flight will carry a crash-test dummy, rather than a human, so that the safety aspects of the design can be analyzed. It’ll launch from a floating platform that the team has also built, which will be towed into the middle of the Baltic Sea by a submarine called Nautilus that the pair built as their last project.
The creators are members of the SomethingAwful web community, and have been posting pictures and answering questions there. In response to one question asking what the chances of the person inside dying are, they replied: “Unlike Columbia we’re not moving at orbital speeds so ‘dying a gruesome death burning up on re-entry’ with our kit has a very low outcome probability.”
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October 28th, 2009
50 years of Exploration map from National Geographic.
It really is amazing how relatively few missions failed considering the use of what we now see as antiquated and, at the time, untested technologies being used to perform such daring missions. Kudos to every scientist, engineer, astronaut, cosmonaut, astronomer, factory worker, mathematician, physicist, and bureaucrat that made these missions possible and more successful than we could imagine.
[hattip: Laughing Squid]
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