After many years of delays and a series of false-starts over the past few months, on the morning of June 5th 2024 the Boeing Starliner spacecraft successfully carried a crew of two – Barry Willmore and Sunita Williams, into orbit and onto a successful docking with the International Space Station on what is a currently […]
Nearly 10 years after I raised concerns about a rockets design choice, I feel I’ve been vindicated in those concerns and, while I know I’ll never get it, request an apology.
After 7 years, the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission has completed successfully, giving us our first tangible bit of early solar-system material to study.
On this sad anniversary in space history, I look to the positives of humanities future.
What is a 4th of July on Xadara without some good old American rocketry? A boring one, that’s what. Today I think I’ll share a video I may have shared before, but if I have oh well – I’m sharing it again. This is a compilation from the late 90’s of launches from Vandenberg Air […]
Today marked the 40th anniversary of the launch of Columbia on the first mission of the Space Shuttle Program, STS-1. It’s a little hard for me to think that it was that along ago, or that the program would go on for just over 30 years, ending in July of 2011 after 135 missions. Of […]
The title isn’t entirely true – there are a few very unimportant entries which had been deleted a while back which are lost. They had no value anyway, unlike the entries I restored this evening. If you have been following this site for long enough or know me to any real degree you will know […]
It’s been a few days since my last post here, and even with that the last few posts were all Apollo 11 related. The 50th anniversary was quite an event to be a part of, even passively as I was. More so than the actual shared experience, intensity and emotion was found in my own […]
The evening of July 20th was spent with me watching the entirety of the Apollo 11 moonwalk as it had happened 50 years ago on that same date. I knew the whole event was only about 2 hours long but, like everything about watching the mission in real time, it was amazing to me how […]
Six and a half hours after landing on the Lunar surface on July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step onto another celestial body. A goal set by President Kennedy back in 1961, and a dream that many cultures in humanity had had for centuries in the past had […]
I just completed watching the Apollo 11 landing in real time, and all I can say, in short form, was it was an incredible experience. I’ve watched the footage before — recall a few years ago I shared the PDI to touchdown footage, but I’ve never experienced the landing in its full context like the […]
This is it. Today is July 20th, 2019. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. To say that I’m excited would be an understatement — it’s just something different to think it’s been 50 years, half a century, since this event. I remember the 25th anniversary well enough (I have a poster related […]
Today is the day. July 16th, 2019 marks 50 years to the day since the launch of Apollo 11 and humanities first landing on the Moon — an event which, to me, is the single greatest accomplishment in human history. It’s amazing how quickly we got to this point – from the Write Brothers first […]
Been a while since I wrote about a space related topic, hasn’t it? Well, I couldn’t let today go by at all without at least covering the sad end of one of my favorite parts of space history – Skylab. Today, July 11th, marks 40 years since Skylab re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Indian […]
It’s the 4th of July and, in what’s becoming a tradition here, instead of typical fireworks I like to celebrate online with something with a little more power behind it – rockets. Old launches, more recent ones, it doesn’t matter to me, I just enjoy seeing these machines do their thing. These aren’t all going […]