In June 1882, at 30 years of age, John Dreyer was appointed Director of Armagh Observatory following the death of Thomas Romney Robinson, who had held the post for a lengthy 59 years. He was the first non-Irishman and non-cleric to hold the position. Dreyer is best remembered for creating Read more
After an amazingly brief 17 months of designing and testing, the ‘Moon buggy’, the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), or Lunar Rover was used from 1971-1972 as a key component of missions 15-17 of the Apollo Program. Created primarily to extend the range of terrain that the two Apollo crew members Read more
Music can be a great way to relax and unwind. Many people play an instrument, are part of a band or enjoying listening to their favourite song on the radio or TV. The iPod generation have music available to them at any time with their portable devices. Enjoying music however, Read more
Back in December 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt spent 75 hours on the Moon before joining their comrade Ron Evans in lunar orbit for the return to Earth. This was the Apollo 17 mission and was the last time to date that anyone walked on the lunar surface. Read more
Neil Armstrong was born in 1930 in Ohio and died in 2012 in Ohio. Between those two dates he became immortal on the Moon. Think about it, as long as there are human beings his name will be remembered. One day perhaps all the heroes and tyrants and martyrs and Read more
Space enthusiasts world-wide have been shocked and saddened by the death of NASA astronaut Sally Ride after a prolonged struggle with cancer.Dr Ride, a physicist, was recruited by NASA in 1978 in its Astronaut Group 8 (the first such group with female astronauts) and flew her first flight on the Read more
In the upcoming weeks you will be hearing in the news the words “Dragon Spacecraft”, so Sinead McNicholl has the full story on what exactly this new vehicle is and what it will be used for. The Dragon is a spacecraft developed by a company called the Space Read more
Three years later after the first men walked on the Moon, the Apollo 16 mission, launched 16 April 1972 , landed men on the moon successfully for the fifth time and as the second such ‘J’-Mission to have been executed, again utilised the Lunar Roving Vehicle. This mission also took Read more
In December 2014, a Delta IV Heavy rocket will thunder skywards from Florida, launching NASA’s first Orion spacecraft to an altitude that has not been achieved by a human spacecraft flight since the last Apollo lunar landing mission forty years ago. Designated Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), this milestone test (to Read more
On 20 February 1962, John Glenn (1921-2016) became the fifth human to enter space. For his spaceflight Glenn, a US Marine Corps aviator was strapped into a tiny Mercury capsule (named Friendship 7) just as Alan Shepard and “Gus” Grissom, the two earlier US astronauts had been. There was a Read more
According to legend, centuries ago a Chinese official named Wan Hu attempted to visit the Moon. His spacecraft was a large wicker chair to which were fastened 47 large rockets (bamboo tubes packed with gunpowder). His underlings rushed forward to light the fuses then retreated. A moment later there was Read more
Fewer than 600 people have ever seen our world from space and only a couple of dozen have travelled far enough away to seen the Earth as a planet against the infinity of space. All have found viewing their homeworld from beyond to be a profound experience. Russian cosmonaut Read more
Space will never be conquered! Sad, but true. Let me explain how I’ve reached this conclusion. Planet Earth is big! The furthest you can travel from home across the Earth’s surface is about 20 000 km (any further and you’re on the way home again). How long would it Read more
St Patrick’s Academy in Dungannon is hosting a fantastic public event for stargazers this Saturday evening. This local school has its own observatory and astronomy club for the students but this event on 3 December is for anyone interested in astronomy (details below). The venue is St. Patrick’s Academy, Read more
A few years ago there was a vogue among historians to write about ‘counterfactuals’.A counterfactual examines the importance of an event for subsequent history by asking what if that event had taken a radically different course.What if the Nazis had invaded the UK in 1940? What if Napoleon had won Read more
Before Yuri Gagarin made the historic first orbit around the Earth in 1961, animals had already visited the unknown. They were used to collect medical data and to test the spacecraft’s durability before sending manned missions. Once the survivability of spaceflight was confirmed, humans then began to travel where previously Read more
This month’s image is a NASA diagram of the classic 1960s Gemini spacecraft. Ten of these craft carried twenty astronauts into orbit between March 1965 and November 1966, filling the gap between the pioneering Mercury flights and the Moon-focused Apollo missions. These were essential to investigate just how to perform Read more
The Lunar Module was an iconic spacecraft which carried two-man crews to and from the Moon’s surface during NASA’s Apollo Program of the 1960s and ‘70s. Along with the Saturn 5 rocket and the Apollo Command and Service Modules (CSM), the Lunar Module is the third of the trinity of Read more
Apollo 15 was sent to the Moon in July 1971, its primary mission goals to explore the spectacular Hadley-Appenine region, carry out scientific experiments from orbit and evaluation of new and improved Apollo equipment,including the Lunar Rover. Here is the story of possibly the most ambitious Apollo moon landing. Read more
The Shuttle era is coming to an end this year thirty years after the launch of Columbia. While it can boast many successes and certainly caught the imagination of the public this project also had some disasters and many critics. Columbia was the first shuttle to be launched on April Read more
It is June 30 1971, and a ground crew in Kazakhstan are waiting to recover three cosmonauts from the Soyuz 11 spacecraft. The trio, the first space station crew, are expected to be unused to terrestrial gravity after their weeks in micro-gravity. The recovery team are expecting to help the Read more
The first American in space, Alan Shepard, made his historic flight fifty years ago. Part of Project Mercury, the flight of Freedom 7 followed mere weeks after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering spaceflight. The Space Race was underway! “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” NASA astronaut Alan Read more
Yuri Gagarin made history fifty years ago, in the midst of the Cold War, the USSR succeeded in putting him in space. Aspects of his mission were kept secret at the time, but Martina Redpath has pushed aside the veil of secrecy. When pondering the successes of the space programs Read more
Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, paved the way for space exploration and truly went where no man had been before. He was the first human in space, Sinead McNicholl tells his story. Gagarin’s triumphant 108 minute flight into space is one of the pivotal events of the 20th Century. It opened Read more
This year will see both the end of space flights by NASA’s Shuttle fleet and the thirtieth anniversary of the first orbital mission by this historic spacecraft. Our coverage of these milestones begins with an overview of the project’s chequered history. In the glory days of the Space Race, Read more
Forty years ago, NASA’s Apollo 14 mission landed the fifth and sixth men on the Moon. Apollo 14 was a triumph for one man in particular. Alan Shepard fought debilitating illness for the chance to walk on another world. On 31 January 1971, Alan B. Shepard Jr. was NASA’s Read more
Today is the anniversary of the deaths of the crew of the shuttle Challenger in 1986. The tragedy was of course recognised world-wide and letters of sympathy flooded in to NASA and the White House. Historian Dwayne Day located a letter from a well-wisher among the papers of the late Read more
Christmas 1968 saw three men from Earth make a remarkable and unprecedented voyage of exploration. A dramatic and hurriedly planned mission gave the crew the first human view of the Moon’s farside and the whole human race saw our homeplanet in a new way. This is the story of Apollo Read more
This year we could have witnessed a Christmas-time shuttle flight as November’s STS-133 mission had been re-scheduled to 17 December, but once again Discovery’s final flight has been postponed, this time to February. Sinead McNicholl has the details. Originally Discovery had been set to launch on 1 November, but this Read more
While you are opening your presents under the Christmas tree, singing some Christmas carols or sitting down to tuck into your turkey dinner on 25 December, spare a thought for a few people above you! Yes, indeed, there will be people onboard the International Space Station spending their Christmas amongst Read more
Sub-orbital space tourism took a step forward on Monday 22 March 2010 when Virgin Galactic’s first spaceplane, VSS Enterprise, took to the air for the first time. The amazing craft was carried by its equally extraordinary twin-fuselage WhiteKnightTwo mothership throughout the flight which was made from Mojave Air and Space Read more