Why Spacecraft Are Using These Crazy Routes To The Moon – Weak Stability and Ballistic Capture.
For decades spacecraft would fly direct to the moon and then brake into lunar orbit, but these days most spacecraft take long circuitous routes, dancing on the edge of stability near the lagrange points of the sun-earth-moon system. These techniques save propellent at the expense of time and navigation complexity. They use the theory of […]
Why The Biggest Laser in the World is Making Big News About Fusion
The National Ignition Facility has finally earned its middle name, generating temperatures and pressures at which a fusion reaction is able to drive itself and maintain the burn for longer. It’s not going to change the world overnight, but it’s another step towards understanding how humanity might be able to harness fusion power in the […]
Will Leaking Russian Spaceship Leave The Crew Stranded In Space?
As a spacewalk was being planned to move a radiator onto a new module on the space station a cooling system on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft was seen leaking into space. This resulted in the space walk being cancelled and the crew investigating this problem while trying to limit effects on the station’s scientific experiments. […]
The Most Powerful Rocket Motors Ever Flown!
#ad Northrop Grumman, builders of the 5 segment solid rocket motors which propelled SLS and turned night into day with the launch of #Artemis 1. Find out more about Artemis at: http://bit.ly/3OreJlh Details on the SLS Boosters: https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/NG-SLS-Booster-2020-1.pdf Follow me on Twitter for more updates: Tweets by DJSnM I have a discord server where I […]
Computers Were So Slow Scientists 'Painted' The First Close Up Image Of Mars
Mariner 4 would be the first successful deep space spacecraft to fly by another planet and take a close up image of the surface. The data rates were so low that it would take 8 hours to downlink the 200×200 images to Earth before the computers could start processing the image and printing them out. […]
Watch NASA's Massive Artemis 1 Rocket Launch In Slow-Mo
Taking one of the official cameras and doing some frame interpolation to show the launch at 1/4 normal speed. Fanfare for Space Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Follow me on Twitter for more updates: Tweets by DJSnM I have a discord server where I regularly turn up: https://discord.gg/zStmKbM […]
The BRIGHTEST Rocket Launch In History – SLS Launches Artemis 1
After years of delay’s NASA’s SLS rocket finally took to the skies and sent Artemis 1 on the way to the moon for a 3 week mission to test the Orion spacecraft and demonstrate its future capabilities to take astronauts beyond low earth orbit for the first time in 50 years. Features some great photos […]
Falcon Heavy Brings the Booms! SLS Hit By Hurricane! – Deep Space Updates November 11th
A round up of all the cool space news, and all the rocket launches from the past couple of weeks. Good Night Oppy coming to Amazon Prime soon: https://press.amazonstudios.com/us/en/original-movies/good-night-oppy Eclipse & airliner photo from: https://twitter.com/astro_graph/ Follow me on Twitter for more updates: Tweets by DJSnM I have a discord server where I regularly turn up: […]
Why The Space Shuttle Only Launched Three Deep Space Missions
The Space Shuttle was “America’s Ride To Space” for 3 decades, it launched over 100 times, and yet over that long career it only launched 3 interplanetary missions – Magellan, Galileo and Ulysses. And all of those were launched in 2 years, after that everything the Shuttle carried remained in Earth orbit. Multiple factors came […]
No, A Meteorite Did Not Burn Down This House
In response to a lot of stories suggesting a spectacular meteorite started a house fire I feel I have to set the record straight and point out that the observations of the meteorite place it 170 miles from the site. Follow me on Twitter for more updates: Tweets by DJSnM I have a discord server […]