How difficult is interstellar travel? I’m a huge fan of space travel both real and imagined, and have followed the voyages of the Starship Enterprise since its earliest manifestations. But warp engines aren’t real, and cheating the universe’s speed limit…
What is the problem with Starliner? Two problems showed up as the spacecraft approached the International Space Station (ISS) back in June. Five of the 28 thrusters used to maneuver in orbit malfunctioned. Four were eventually brought back to…
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Posted in human spaceflight, Mars, Rocket Science, Sergei Korolev, Spacecraft
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A MARTIAN CRATER Korolev Crater on Mars is located in the far north of that planet, in the low plains that surround the northern polar regions. Its site is marked by a red star at the upper left of the…
How many rocket engines does it take to lift off on your way to the moon? Five? Thirty? Thirty-three? This is the tale of three very different booster rockets, all of them designed to send humans to the moon, and…
Getting humans to Mars will be hard. Getting them back safely to Earth will be harder. Let’s look at what it will take. We’re going to get successively more technical as we go, so if you want to bail out…
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flew its first commercial passengers to space today (June 29, 2023), joining Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. There are significant differences in the achievements of these three billionaire-funded ventures, however. SpaceX is by…
A power lifting record more than fifty years old is soon to be broken. No, I’m not talking about barbells and grunting strong men. The mighty Saturn V is about to be dethroned as the world’s most powerful rocket ever…
Were you aware that, in addition to the International Space Station (ISS), there is a Chinese space station orbiting Earth? If not, it’s probably a combination of Chinese opaqueness and the lack of coverage of anything beyond our borders by…
Every science fiction show that has its protagonists zipping around the solar system and traveling from one planet to another in a few days or weeks instead of months or years requires some fictional propulsion system. Star Trek of course…
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…