15 years ago today the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off on what was to become its last mission, STS-107. This flight carried a crew of 7 not to the International Space Station – Columbia was far too heavy for the orbital inclination the Space Station orbits at – but a simple Earth Orbit mission for […]
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 […]
A few days ago, Soyuz MS-05 made a safe landing back on Earth, freeing up space on the station for the Expedition 54-55 crew of Anton Shkaplerov, Scott Tingle, and Norishige Kanai. This was an early morning launch here in the US, but it was mid-day at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan – the perfect time […]
Today NASA released a nice little video simulation of what it would be like to enter Jupiter’s Great Red Spot – a massive storm, larger than the Earth, that has been raging on the planet for at least 300 years! Incidentally, Jupiter is probably my favorite planet in the solar system – As a kid […]
Early in the morning of December 7th, 1972, the final Apollo mission to the Moon, Apollo 17, launched from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center carrying Gene Cernan, Ron Evans, Harrison Schmitt to the Taurus–Littrow lunar valley. Apollo 17’s landing location and planned launch time dictated the first night launch of any manned American […]
In a bit of space news that nearly made me tear up, it looks like NASA JPL has been able to successfully fire a thruster system on Voyager 1 that hasn’t been used since 1980! These small rocket motors, designed to fire in long-duration burns for course correction, will be used in upcoming years to […]
40 years ago, the twin Voyager 1 and 2 space probes were just starting on their historic journeys to the outer solar system. Voyager 1 destined to visit Saturn and Jupiter, Voyager 2 destined to not only study those planets, but also to be the first, and still only probe to fly by Uranus and […]
Update 6-23-2018: The original upload channel has been deleted. This article has been replaced by a new one for the 45th anniversary of the Skylab 2 mission here: https://www.xadara.com/skylab-the-first-40-days/ Switching gears just a bit back to space, we have this nice little film from the mid 70’s regarding the first manned Skylab mission. Skylab was […]
Time to go back to the early days of the Space Shuttle program. 1980, in this case, when the first flight was still in the middle of a variety of delays. The Space Shuttle was basically ready, but as luck would have it one thing after another kept the vehicle grounded until April 12th, 1981, […]
Last week marked the penultimate launch of the Delta II rocket, carrying the JPSS-1 satellite into a polar orbit to help with weather research and forecasting here in the United States. Today I bring you a pair of videos – the first is the launch highlights clip, produced by United Launch Alliance, showing clips of […]
I’m glad I stayed up for this one – early this morning, 1:47 Pacific Time (3:47 Central Time for me) marked the launch of the NASA / NOAA Joint Polar Satellite System 1, or JPSS-1, weather satellite. As the name implies, JPSS-1 is the first of a new set of polar orbiting weather satellites which […]
Early this morning (incidentally, at the same time as a planned, but scrubbed, Delta II launch) the Cygnus cargo vehicle SS Gene Cernan, which was launched on Sunday, arrived at the International Space Station and was successfully berthed to the Station This differs from docking in that Cygnus doesn’t attach itself to the Space Station, […]
On Sunday morning an Orbital ATK Antares booster launched from pad 0 at Wallops Island, Virginia, carrying the SS Gene Cernan, a Cygnus cargo vehicle carrying 3 tons of supplies, to orbit for a resupply mission to the International Space Station. This mission marks the 8th resupply mission by Orbital ATK under NASA’s Commercial Resupply […]