pale blue dot
On July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, two American astronauts, Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle on the Moon. It was the first time humans set foot on another planetary body other than Earth, making the moon landing probably the most monumental event in history. Vox.com …
Continue reading “Apollo 11’s journey to the moon, annotated (video)”
On August 6, 2012, at 05:17 UTC, NASA has successfully landed a Mini-Cooper-sized rover, Curiosity, on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars. The 900-kg rover (899 kg, to be exact, which is 1,982 lbs) is equipped with six 50 cm (20 in) diameter wheels in a rocker-bogie suspension (see notes 1). For the first time in …
NASA has just published Two Years’ Worth of Apollo 11 Mission Audio (the first crewed moon landing mission) on their website “Explore Apollo“. That’s more than 19,000 hours of audio. So now anyone can hear the endless hours of conversations between the Apollo 11 astronauts and Houston. Some recordings are really exciting, for example, the …
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The mighty Saturn V, the rocket that took humans to the moon, remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status (as of 2018). It was used by NASA between 1967 and 1973. It was powered by five Rocketdyne F-1 engines. With a thrust of 1,746,000 lbf (7,770 kN) in vacuum …
Continue reading “Why can’t we Remake the Rocketdyne F-1 Engine, which took humans to the Moon?”
On July 20, 2018 (on the 49th anniversary of the moon landing), Linn LeBlanc, Chief Operating Officer at Buzz Aldrin Ventures, LLC asked on Twitter that: “Where were you 49 years today when @TheRealBuzz and Neil Armstrong made those historic first steps onto the Moon. Congratulations to the #Apollo11 crew and to the thousands that …
On his Twitter account, Andrew Jones, a journalist reporting on China’s space program and related activities, has published amazing images of the Earth and the Moon captured from China’s Queqiao lunar communications relay satellite, a key component of Chang’e 4 lunar landing mission.
Alan Bean, the fourth person to walk on the Moon has died today (May 26, 2018). He was the fourth person to walk on the Moon: in November 1969, he spent 10+ hours on the lunar surface during Apollo 12 mission, the sixth crewed flight in the United States Apollo program, and the second to …
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A crescent-Earth photo, by an automatic camera aboard the unpiloted Apollo 4 command module on November 9, 1967, at an altitude of 11,200 miles (18,000 km). Apollo 4, (also known as AS-501), was the first uncrewed test flight of NASA’s mighty Saturn V rocket, which was used by the U.S. Apollo program to send the …
Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? This supposed right is often claimed as the last resort of the wilfully ignorant, the person who is cornered by evidence and mounting opinion: ‘I believe climate change is a hoax whatever anyone else says, and I have a right to believe it!’ …
Continue reading “You don’t have a right to believe whatever you want to”
A great short science fiction film, “Others Will Follow”, created and directed by Andrew Finch and published on Vimeo, tells the story of a crewed Mars mission. An accident occurs and the spacecraft breaks apart, the last survivor (we don’t see what happens to the rest of the crew, but presumably they have died) manages …
