2013 marked 40 years since Skylab, NASA’s first post-Moon landings human spaceflight project, was sent into orbit. Here is an overview of this rather forgotten series of missions. So what was Skylab? Skylab was the first and so far last all-American space station to orbit the Earth. It Read more…
Spacecraft with a lenticular design (that is, shaped like a biconvex lens) were actively studied by NASA and US industry in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. A craft of such a shape would experience lower heating on re-entry than a winged layout as the heat would be spread over 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…
Has lurid fiction like the movie Iron Sky any basis in fact? Everyone knows that WW2 Germany developed rockets far in advance of the Allies, but some argue that in 1945 the Third Reich was on the verge of developing a space program! Ever since Adolf Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year’ Read more…
NASA’s Space Shuttles have become a familar sight in their thirty years of service, but there have been other shuttle designs which never left the ground.Some were ingenious alternative concepts to the vehicle which is shortly to be retired, some were potential replacements and there was even a couple of Read more…
Apollo 18 is a SF/Horror movie presented as newly-found film footage taken by the fictional crew of a lost 1970s lunar landing mission. The Apollo 18 film uses real NASA movie footage from the Moon (some of it doctored with CGI) and new studio-shot footage with actors and special effects Read more…
NASA’s next manned spacecraft will be the Orion, a capsule which will be carried into space by a rocket. Weighing 25 tonnes, each Orion will carry up to six people. Accommodation on board is cosy at best, cramped at worst. Orion was intended to take astronauts to the Moon and Read more…
In the early 1960s, the sky had no limits for NASA . Planners for the agency foresaw an ever-expanding future of exploration through the Solar System. Some amazing missions were planned. Alas in August 1967, the US Congress refused to support NASA’s plans for the 1970s. Ever since then NASA’s Read more…
The late ’50s and ’60s were a different time from the anxious era that is today. Nuclear power and space travel were both cool and wonderful new technologies. The only thing that could be cooler and more wonderful would be to combine the two. One suggestion was the US Read more…
The Blue Streak rocket was an advanced British missile of the 1950s which nearly became a space rocket before ending up a casualty of government apathy. Let’s look at Blue Streak’s rise and fall. These days most British economists agree that designing and manufacturing things are rather icky Read more…
If you read the forums and the comments sections of blogs about spaceflight you will see many posts bemoaning how the conquest of space hasn’t quite gone according to plan. By now, rocket-launched capsules ought to have been rapidly superseded by reusable spaceplanes, spacestations should be huge wheel-shaped things, people Read more…