This footage, taken from the interview shared in the previous article, is a combination of modern Lunar imagery of the Apollo 11 landing site matched up with the footage from the camera onboard the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. I had previously found the combined videos, but I had not seen until yesterday this version with […]
UPDATE: I’m aware the video is no longer available. I will be looking for an alternateive source. If I do not find one, this article will stay in this state until such a time as I do. 48 Years ago today, on July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon as […]
This film is a quick, 6 minute look at the navigation and guidance systems of the Apollo spacecraft. Something I noticed is that the film is dated to 1966, but uses footage from what is clearly the Apollo 6 mission, an unmanned Saturn V launch in April of 1968 – my best guess is this […]
July 16th, 1969, the day 48 years ago that a Saturn V rocket launched carrying Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin into Earth orbit, and then beyond it towards the first attempted landing on the Moon. That landing of course would be successful on July 20th, 1969. Give that it’s a Sunday and an […]
This film just got uploaded to YouTube by regular historic footage source Jeff Quitney, and what a film it is! A very to-the-point 10 minute or so film about a B-52 Stratofortress which lost it’s fail fin during a test flight over Colorado! Now, under most circumstances, an aircraft without a tail fin would lose […]
Project Mercury was the United States first manned space flight program. This film gives a good overview of the Mercurty Spacecraft, it’s launch into orbit on an Atlas Missile, and the training of the Mercury 7 Astronauts for the stresses and demanding requirements of space flight. As it would happen, Project Mercury would have 6 […]
When computers as we think of them today (microcomputers, as the terminology of the day would name them) were introduced, one of the most critical uses of them, and certainly the one most people took to the easiest, was typing out documents. Be it something for a business, a letter to a friend, writing the […]
6 Years ago today, the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle program. I wrote an entry last year, but incidentally, for whatever reason, didn’t include launch video. No idea why, but I’m rectifying that now. The Final Liftoff of Atlantis The Space Shuttle is the most-flown American manned […]
It’s the 4th of July tomorrow and, being quite honest, I had nothing quite planned to write today or tomorrow. However, to keep up with the spirit of Xadara, my love of space, and in a classic “Happy Birthday America” bit of patriotism, I’ve decided to just flood you with some random rocket launches in […]
When both the NES Classic Edition and now the SNES Classic Edition were announced, a common comment from many in the gaming scene were that these mini-consoles were pointless, or some kind of similar lack of understanding why people are fascinated by them. This stems from a misconception of the very target demographic these machines […]
In a little bit of news that has the geekier side of the internet smiling, the .gif file format turns 30 today, June 15th, 2017. Yep, the same file format that beings you all those horribly annoying 1 second long looping animations on every buzzfeed top 10 list, the file format that no one wants […]
Considering today is June 6th, the 73rd Anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Nazi Occupied Europe, I think it would be a fine day to share a few World War 2 related informational videos; in this case, a film showing the process of how bombs are loaded onto a B-17 bomber. I never thought there […]
Computers, explained in their most simplest form, perform tasks they are told to do – namely, calculations. Put enough calculations together, and you can do some interesting things. Telling the machine to do these various tasks one element at a time, though, would be an intense process. Instead, we use various programming languages to write […]
Getting back to the grind, we might as well start with this video, uploaded today , which is a digital conversion of a 1966 film about the process of filming and photographing rocket launches at Vandernberg Air Force Base. Launches from VAFB were more common than launches from the Eastern Test Range and Cape Canaveral […]
On May 18th, 1969, John Young, Tom Stafford, and Gene Cernan began an 8 day mission that would act as a “dress rehearsal” for the planned manned landing on the Moon of Apollo 11. This flight was the 2nd of 4 that would be launched in 1969, and would serve to test the Lunar Module […]