As I’m sure most everyone has seen, a few days ago on April 10th the first photo ever of a Black Hole was released. An object that in effect should be impossible to visualize was captured, thanks to a lucky arrangement of the gasses surrounding the object. The entire story on just how it was […]
I had a long post planned here, but didn’t feel it was quite right, so I’ll try to keep this as short as possible. No, I won’t have the usual in depth explanations of what I mean here – I’ve done enough of that, and and won’t waste my time explaining it further. People choose […]
Yesterday was a somewhat emotional day for those who follow current events in space exploration as NASA finally called an end of mission to the Opportunity rover on Mars. This little machine had been doing its thing on Mars for 15 years, roaming around doing science alongside its twin “Spirit” which reached its own end […]
Anyone who has followed this site over the past few years will notice a few constants about what I write about – technology, gaming, social commentary, and space and rocketry. Given the depth of the articles I’ve written on the subject, my absolute love of that last category, space, and rocketry, is well documented. Even […]
Rocket Labs “Electron” made its second successful and first commercial flight on November 11th, 2018, successfully carrying a compliment of small cubesats into orbit. Let’s go over this one more time – it’s the 3rd flight ever of this launch vehicle, and it’s already making full commercial flights. Now that’s success! Electron in flight. #ItsBusinessTime […]
Dang, it’s been a week since the last major post here. All I’ve done since then are a few update posts which really haven’t been all that necessary. Right, I guess it’s time to get back to normal around here. I’m going to try to keep this short and to the point – no need […]
I wouldn’t normally ask, but I’d really hope everyone hitting this page does take some time to read this, to see what being a blogger can be like when things go bad. October has been an incredible month here on Xadara. I’ve cranked out more articles than nearly any other month ever, and have had […]
Let’s go back to October 29th, 1998. I was in 8th grade at the time. I don’t recall if I knew the launch of Glenn was happening that day – I want to think I was aware – but for whatever reason early in the afternoon that Thursday the students assembled in the school gym […]
On October 29th, 1998 the Space Shuttle Discovery launched from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center for a relatively typical 10-day mission in Earth orbit, save for one key element – onboard the vehicle was John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth. To say this mission was a big deal at the time […]
The paralells between the American and Soviet space programs in 1967 to 1968 are quite strange. On January 27th 1967 America had the Apollo 1 Fire which resulted in the delay of the first manned flight of Apollo until October 1968 and the Apollo 7 Mission. The Soviet Union had a similarly bad situation with […]
Here we have a more “traditional” film regarding the flight of Apollo 7 – the typical official NASA Film covering the mission in concise detail, and what detail it is. The launch footage shown in this film is outstanding – an incredible close up of the Saturn IB booster as it lifts off of the […]
Here we have quite the interesting little bit of space history – the pilot of a series which was intended to follow every Apollo mission, but was cut short due to the perception of a “conflict of interests” between sponsors of the program itself and the television studio behinc it, KCET out of Los Angeles. […]
On October 22nd, 1968 the Apollo 7 command module carrying Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, bringing an end to the first manned Apollo mission, and bringing confidence back to the nations space program, and our efforts to make it to the Moon before the end of […]
It’s been a while since I looked at the successful deployment and mission of the German MASCOT lander, which was deployed on the asteroid Ryugu on October 2nd. Powered by batteries, it was designed to do a few hops on the surface, take photos, do some scans, and last only about 12 hours which, at […]
Following up on last nights awesome launch of the BepiColombo spacecraft on its mission to study Mercury, I thought it only fitting to share the launch highlights video on the beginning of the mission – the launch of Arianespace VA245! These videos are similar to the ones United Launch Alliance puts out for their launches, […]