pale blue dot
On 12 April, the International Day of Human Space Flight commemorates the first human – Yuri Gagarin – traveling to space in 1961, and the inaugural Space Shuttle mission on the same day in 1981. Since Gagarin, humans have flown to space hundreds of times, including six missions to the moon, and have maintained a …
Continue reading “Human spaceflight is a risk worth taking, says ESA head”
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule arrives at the International Space Station (ISS) following up a historic liftoff with an equally smooth docking. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule (named Endeavour by the crew) docked automatically to the ISS, no assistance needed.
How did I miss this for years? In this brilliant video below, software engineer Bret Copeland explains how to land the space shuttle… from space!
The American science communicator Emily Calandrelli (also known as The Space Gal, @TheSpaceGal on Twitter) published a very funny video on her Twitter account, which can be titled “please use crewed, not manned”. To explain her cause, Calandrelli used the popular “Joey, the famous ‘Friends’ character being taught French” meme, where Phoebe hopelessly tries to …
With dreams of Mars on the minds of both NASA and Elon Musk, long-distance crewed missions through space are coming. But you might be surprised to learn that modern rockets don’t go all that much faster than the rockets of the past. Iain Boyd, University of Colorado Boulder
An amazing image titled “Capturing a Satellite” by NASA: Astronaut Dale A. Gardner prepares to dock with the spinning WESTAR VI satellite during the STS-51A mission. He was wearing a getting his turn in the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU, see notes 1). Gardner used a large tool called the Apogee Kick Motor Capture Device to …
This short video titled “how orbits work” beautifully explains what is an orbit and what you should do to enter into a stable one around Earth, or any other celestial body.
On January 9, 2012, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this amazing footage of the orbital moonset.
The American television personality, musician, puppeteer, writer, and producer “Mister” Fred Rogers (Fred McFeely Rogers, March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003) reads some of Apollo 15 Astronaut Al Worden’s space poems at his TV show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, which ran from 1968 to 2001.
Robert Frost, a NASA employee, has shut down a conspiracy theorist on the popular question-answer site Quora. He perfectly explained how NASA sends probes and rovers to Mars. I wanted to share it here because his answer is so informative and enlightening.
