Well I’ll be damned, they actually did it. Barely.
After 4 Tries, Starship Finally Has a (Barely) Successful Mission
Tag: space
The Historic Launch of Starliner
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 […]
Are You Ever Going To Admit I Was Right About Starship And Super Heavy?
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.
The OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Mission Was A Success
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.
The Return Of The Only Articles I’ve Ever Deleted From This Site
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 […]
The “Final” Space Article (For Now, Anyway…)
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 […]
My Battery Is Low And It’s Getting Dark – #ThankYouOppy
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 […]
What Happened To All The Space Content?
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 […]
Space Can Be Overwhelming At Times – A Major Update
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 […]
50 Years Ago: The Flight Of Soyuz 3 – The Soviet Return To Space
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 […]
Atlas V – AEHF-4 Launch Highlights
I’m a little late on this one, but here we have the launch highlights video for the AEHF-4 launch from earlier this week. It was all in all another wonderful Atlas V launch. Yep. This video has the usual clips of the assembly and rollout of the Atlas V followed by some nice shots of […]
BepiColombo Begins Its Mission To Mercury – Ariane 5 Flight VA245
Mercury isn’t a very well understood planet, and up until relatively recently, it was considered a boring, dead world not worth focusing on. All this changed with NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft and its amazing mission to Mercury discovered evidence of water ice on the incredibly hot planet. BepiColombo is a joint ESA and JAXA mission to […]
4K Launch Video Of Soyuz MS-10
Here we have an interesting clip of the initial launch and ascent of the failed Soyuz MS-10 launch on Thursday, October 11th. This footage looks to have been taken from a drone flying a few hundred feet away, and is indeed good quality, albeit still a “from the ground” view. The video seems to end […]
50 Years Ago: The Launch Of Apollo 7
This is it. 50 years ago today on October 11th, 1968 the manned portion of the Apollo Program began with the launch of Apollo 7, a mission designed to test the newly redesigned Apollo Command / Service Module in Earth orbit with an actual crew for up to 2 weeks – the estimated length of […]
The Soyuz MS-10 Mission Ends In A Launch Abort!
I certainly wasn’t expecting to wake up to this bit of news, but it’s a statistical probability – this morning Soyuz MS-10 launch ended about 2 minutes into flight with an abort after some kind of anomaly with the Soyuz booster. As of right now, the news is spotty, but the good news is the […]