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 […]
The first manned mission to Skylab launched on May 25th 1973, carrying astronauts Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin, and Paul Weitz on a planned 28 day stay on the United States first space station. The first thing the crew would need to do, however, was make Skylab livable. Skylab was heavily damaged during its launch on […]
When the United States first space station, Skylab, was launched on May 14th, 1973, it suffered major damage – the micro meteoroid shield intended to protect the station from space debris and the heat of the Sun was torn off, causing temperatures in the station to rise far beyond what the vehicle was designed for. […]
45 years ago today, the final Saturn V to fly launched from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, carrying on it the first (and only) space station for the United States: Skylab (often stylized as “SkyLab”) I absolutely love Skylab. The station itself, how it came to be, and the dramatic story of its […]
Something I like about the Internet is how quickly people will update you when information is out of date or incorrect. In this case, I have been following what sources I could on Tiangong-1 when someone on twitter alerted me that it had already been confirmed to have re-entered, in this case, at 5:16PM Pacific […]
By the time most people read this, the event will already have happened and I will have my follow-up article on the subject, but for now, this is still worth writing about. UPDATE: It re-entered at 8:16 PM Central Daylight Time – https://www.xadara.com/tiangong-1-is-gone/ Tiangong-1 is now estimate by the European Space Agency to re-enter sometime […]
Back in October I gave a status update on Tiangong-1, China’s first Space Station, and how, since the end of crewed operations, contact and control of the station has been lost. Well, we are approaching the final week or so of the stations time in orbit, and the situation hasn’t changed – it’s still out […]
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 This article has been replaced by a new one for the 45th anniversary of the Skylab 2 mission here: https://www.xadara.com/skylab-the-first-40-days/ Switching gears just a bit back to space, we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 […]
Forgive me for the title – I needed something that wasn’t the same “Tiangong-1 Will Crash Into Earth” article title that every other place covering this seems to be using. The statement is true, though. For whatever reason, contact and control of Tiangong-1 was lost in early 2016, and over the past year and a […]
In what seems so far to be a flawless mission, Soyuz MS-05 made a successful docking with the Rassvet module of the International Space Station slightly ahead of schedule, a little before 6 hours after its launch on the 28th. The images of the docking are quite beautiful – the below video shows views from […]
The next crew to the International Space Station launched today on Soyuz MS-05. It was early morning here in the US but late evening at Baikonour; this created lighting conditions that allowed for some of the most beautiful Soyuz launch footage I have ever seen! It’s well worth checking the footage out since it so […]
China’s space program is moving along nicely – on the 20th we had the launch of the Tianzhou 1 cargo craft, it successfully docking with their Tiangong-2 space station today, the 22nd. This launch not only marks China’s first automated docking and first flight of their future space station resupply vehicle, but also, thanks to […]
A few days ago China launched a crewed mission to it’s newest space station, Tiangong 2. The crew has since successfully docked and are, as far as reports indicate, having a perfectly normal mission on board the orbital laboratory. Obviously in reading this you know that they are space stations, sure, but just what are […]
Very early today, at around 7:30 in the morning Beijing time, China launched its Shenzhou 11 mission to its new Tiangong 2 space station. Tiangong 2, which was launch September 15th of 2016, can support the manned mission for around 30 days, or so reports say. Shenzhou is a spacecaft very similar to the Soviet […]
On October 11th, 1971, the worlds first Space Station, Salyut 1, burned up on reentry over the Pacific ocean after just 175 days in orbit, and 2 crewed missions to the station. It was the first in a long series of Salyut Stations, a design heritage that would span all the way to the Mir […]