Early in the morning of April 4th, 1968, on launch pad 39-A at the Kennedy Space Center, the second Saturn V rocket to fly was launched. This mission was Apollo 6 – another unmanned test of the Saturn V and the Apollo Command-Service module, much the same as the Apollo 4 mission in November of […]
It’s amazing what a one-off sports event will make a city do that it had never done before. When a city gets to host the Olympics, they build an entire complex to host said games, usually demolishing a decently sized area to even get the land together for this new facility – one that is […]
Something I like about the Internet is how quickly people will update you when information is out of date or incorrect. In this case, I have been following what sources I could on Tiangong-1 when someone on twitter alerted me that it had already been confirmed to have re-entered, in this case, at 5:16PM Pacific […]
By the time most people read this, the event will already have happened and I will have my follow-up article on the subject, but for now, this is still worth writing about. UPDATE: It re-entered at 8:16 PM Central Daylight Time – https://www.xadara.com/tiangong-1-is-gone/ Tiangong-1 is now estimate by the European Space Agency to re-enter sometime […]
On March 27th, 1968, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, the first human in space, died in a plane crash during what would be otherwise a very routine training flight. This in an of itself would be, and is, a tragedy in the history of humanities achievements in space, but the events surrounding this crash, and Gagarin’s life […]
Back in October I gave a status update on Tiangong-1, China’s first Space Station, and how, since the end of crewed operations, contact and control of the station has been lost. Well, we are approaching the final week or so of the stations time in orbit, and the situation hasn’t changed – it’s still out […]
On March 17th, 1958 the United States Navy successfully launched a satellite in its Vanguard program, Vanguard 1. This was the same type of rocket and payload as in the failed Vanguard TV-3 incident that embarrassed the United States back in December of 1957, and another test in February 1958 which also ended in failure. […]
It’s been a while since we took a trip back to 1989 and these old tapes discussing strategies on various games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, so we might as well get back to em! In this case, Volume 1, Tape 7. This tape features the games: A Boy And His Blob, Rolling Thunder, Castlevania, […]
Back in September of last year, toy retail chain Toys-R-Us filed for bankruptcy. At the time, everyone across the internet, in their complete lack of comprehension on how anything works, proclaimed the end of the company, and began wondering when stores would start closing. This wasn’t the case at the time – far from it. […]
This is a rather interesting, albeit outright strange episode of the Computer Chronicles. It discuses a concept known as the “Fifth Generation Computer” which when you first hear it sounds like a discussion on computers produced around the time of this episode, 1984. That’s not actually the case: The term “Fifth Generation Computer” in this […]
We take for granted the fact that over the past 20+ years now we’ve been able to pretty much run whatever we want on our computer at whatever time we want – even at the same time. This seems normal to us, but it wasn’t always the case. In early computer systems, either as a […]
Today I present you with this rather simple 1982 clip from the Australian television program “Towards 2000” where they discuss the newest thing in music – the Compact Disc. Starting off covering a history of non-magnetic music recording mediums; Wax Cylinders, Edison Diamond Discs, Standard 78 RPM records, then finally the microgroove Long-Playing record, the […]
On the morning of February 1st, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was set to return from it’s 28th mission, STS-107. At 7:59 AM Central time the orbiter disintegrated on re-entry due to damage it had sustained on its left wing during launch on January 16th. In this article, I tell the story from my perspective. […]
The Columbia Disaster February 1st, 2003 7:59 AM Central Standard Time OV-102, Columbia, Disintegrates over Central Texas Total loss of vehicle and crew 15 Years Ago Rick D. Husband William C. McCool David M. Brown Kalpana Chawla Michael P. Anderson Laurel B. Clark Ilan Ramon
In the late evening, just an hour before midnight on January 31st, 1958, the United States launched it’s first satellite – Explorer 1. Explorer 1 was our answer to Sputnik 1 and 2. At least, it was our successful answer – our previous attempt, Vanguard TV3, ended in a very famous disastrous failure barely leaving […]