Rockets are hard, and I imagine they especially want to be careful with a payload going to the Moon (even if it’s insured, it’s still time-consuming to replace).
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George Dvorsky
georgedvorsky
George is a senior reporter specializing in spaceflight, space policy, and space exploration. He has appeared in such publications as NYT, Forbes, Guardian, Slate, and BBC.
well the next Indiana Jones episode will be “nazis on the moon” (cf Iron Sky) so there’s that. Read more
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What you call “tortured” some of us call “dimply greatness”!
I believe Capstone is currently testing a vertical orbit that accomplishes this.
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For the H2 O2 main engines, they mostly output water. For the solid rocket boosters, those things are pretty nasty. The boosters give off water, CO2, hydrogen chloride gas, and a metal oxide, typically aluminum. Wouldn’t want to breathe that stuff.
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Watched it live with my brother via text. It was pretty awesome. Glad to see it get up finally. I was fully expecting another scrub the way this has been going. Let's go back to the moon!
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China, it would appear, is not willing to march down that same path Read more
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I was on Merritt Island when the first one landed. Seeing them come down was magical and the Starman video made me weepy the first time seeing it.
Before they started doing this, if I saw this type of landing in a Sci-Fi movie 15 years ago my thought would be “That looks totally fake, rockets could never do that.”
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Flawless launch and double booster landing. That will never get old. Watching that makes me feel like I live in the future.
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I would not consider the deorbit problem solved just because the Cygnus test was performed. That was an important step to gather data needed to design the deorbit plan; don’t assume that because they did that, everything is settled. It isn’t. At this point, NASA is exploring everything, but right now they’re still… Read more
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Enterprise is a beautiful thing, and a marvel of engineering. Also interesting, no two space shuttles are exactly the same. They kept learning how to build them better, so that they literally shaved more than 3,000 kg of weight from Columbia to Endeavor. Saw it in NYC this year, and here are a couple shots I took:
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These photos are delightful. I visited Kennedy Space Center for the first time in 1979 and came home with several die-cast models of Enterprise and its 747. I think they are still in my parents’ attic.
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Brings back memories! As a kid I got to see Enterprise when it stopped at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois on that last piggyback flight back east. I remember making a pencil sketch and then building a model from cardboard and balsa wood.
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a quarry near Milton Keynes in the U.K., which nicely simulates alien environments Read more
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