Category: Space

The Amazing Success Of The Rocket Lab “Electron” Launch Vehicle

In a bit of rocketry news that I’m long overdue for writing about, back on January 21st, 2018, the New Zealand company Rocket Lab had the first successful launch of their Electron rocket – a booster designed to launch very small payloads into Earth orbit. Not only does this mark New Zealand’s entry into orbital […]

Atlas V SBIRS GEO-4 Launch Highlights

Here we have, as always, the launch highlights from last weeks Atlas V SBIRS launch. It was an early evening launch with spectacular views, as is usually the case for an Atlas V launch. This particular clip is interesting to me in that this being Launch Complex 41, it’s the same one that Cassini, and […]

SBIRS Geo-4 Successfully Launches On An Atlas V Rocket

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V lifted off yesterday from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying the 4th Geostationary Satellite in the  Space-Based Infrared System, a collection of specialty satellites operated by the United States Air Force designed to assist the United States military in situational awareness in the battlefield, especially […]

Delta IV NROL-47 Launch Highlights

Here we have the launch highlights video for the United Launch Alliance Delta IV launch of NROL-47. As is standard for these launch highlights videos, it covers the usual pre-launch preparations, and contains many views of the vehicle which were not shown during the actual launch live stream. It includes some quite beautiful views of […]

Space Industry Fanboys, Credibility Claims, And Cherry Picking – Dissecting A Twitter Discussion

Yesterday proved to be a bit interesting for me on Twitter. I was giving my own comments on the Delta IV launch yesterday, one of which was my typical congratulations tweet to United Launch Alliance, the operators of Delta IV, and the CEO of the company,  Tory Bruno. At the end, though, I left a […]

John Young

Yesterday was, needles to say, a rather rough day for me. I woke up quite late, as usual, to the news that Astronaut John Young had died the previous day, January 5th. John Young was an absolute legend among astronauts, up there as high as Alan Shepard, John Glenn or Neil Armstrong. John Young flew […]