Does anyone still know how to read a paper map in the era of GPS? I will confess that although I could use such a map for travel, I seldom do so. I love maps, and my home office has…
Year: 2020
The Stuff Planets Are Made Of
Of what does our solar system consist? There are the big and obvious things: the sun, the planets, and the moons which orbit those planets. The cloud of gas and dust from which all this condensed 4.6 billion years ago…
The Great Conjunction
Our night sky appears to us like an overarching dome sprinkled with bright points of light. Some of those points of light appear to be very close to each other, and indeed the ancients envisioned the stars as all being…
Mars Is Hard
Every 26 months, when Mars and Earth align themselves properly, a launch window opens to allow an efficient path to the red planet. Three spacecraft are currently on their way to arrive in February of next year. One of these…
The Arab World Goes To Mars
51 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their lunar module Eagle on the Sea of Tranquility. In 1969, the United States and the Soviet Union were the only spacefaring nations in the world. Yesterday (yesterday EDT; July…
BACK TO THE RED PLANET
There have been 18 attempts to land a spacecraft on Mars. Ten have succeeded. Nine of those ten have been NASA missions. The Soviet Union achieved the first landing, but communications were lost for good after only 15 seconds. Every…
CREWED SPACECRAFT (PART 4)
All the attention being paid to the Apollo program of 50 years ago is both understandable and justified. It was an amazing technical achievement, all the more amazing because it relied on ground-based computers that occupied rooms rather than desktops—or…
CREWED SPACECRAFT (PART 3)
The political nature of the U.S.-Soviet Space Race of the 1960s is probably no better illustrated than by the short-lived Voskhod program. Two flights in what amounted to re-tooled Vostok capsules, both designed more for space spectaculars and “firsts” that…
CREWED SPACECRAFT (PART 2)
“You don’t get in it, you put it on.” The Mercury spacecraft in which America’s first astronauts rode into space was so small and cramped that none of them could be taller than 5’11”. Why so small? The rockets of…
CREWED SPACECRAFT (PART 1)
Those of us old enough to remember the heady days of the 1960s when humans first ventured into space can rattle off the names easily. Vostok, Mercury, Voshkod, Gemini. And of course, Apollo. Some of us even sought out Revell…
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