Showing posts with the label Space

A Piece of Sputnik in Manitowoc, Wisconsin

Oct 30, 2023

In the early 1960s, before the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin to space, they began their Vostok programme with a series of unmanned test flight...

Nedelin Catastrophe: The Worst Space-Related Disaster

Sep 19, 2023

The Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan is one of the busiest and the most important spaceport on earth with over a thousand satellit...

The Oldest Functioning Satellite

Apr 10, 2023

The Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1, or LCS-1, is a large, hollow, aluminum sphere with a precisely defined cross-section that has been on Eart...

Why Soviet Cosmonauts Carried a Gun to Space

Oct 27, 2022

For decades, the standard survival kit carried by Russian cosmonauts aboard the Soyuz spacecraft included a specially built gun and a few do...

How an Ancient Piece of Earth Rock Ended Up on The Moon

Oct 11, 2022

The six Apollo missions that landed on the moon from 1969 to 1972 brought back several hundred kilograms of rocks from the lunar surface. Sc...

Félicette: The Cat Who Went to Space

Sep 8, 2022

During the early years of space flight, animals were frequently flown into space and their bodies examined to investigate the various physio...

Luna 9: The First Soft Landing on Another Planetary Body

Jun 2, 2022

The first spacecraft to achieve a survivable soft-landing on the moon was the Soviet unmanned spacecraft Luna 9. It was an exceedingly diffi...

The Great Comet of 1861

May 19, 2022

The 19th century was a great time for sky watchers. Between 1811 and 1882 as many as eight great comets became visible from earth dazzling s...

Belka and Strelka: Soviet Space Dogs

Dec 17, 2021

In August 1960, two dogs named Belka and Strelka completed went to space aboard a Soviet spacecraft, stayed for a full day orbiting, and ret...

Venera 7, The First Craft to Make Controlled Landing on Another Planet And Send Data From its Surface

Dec 9, 2021

By 1961 the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union had been going on for six years. The Soviets had the upper hand, havin...

Vladimir Komarov: The Cosmonaut Who Fell From Space

Nov 9, 2021

The year 1967 held special significance for Soviet Union—it was the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, as well as the 10th annivers...

The Soviet Moon Prank

Sep 24, 2021

In December 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, became the first men to fly around the moon and return to earth. But they ...

The First Mars Rover

Jul 26, 2021

In May 1971, the Soviet Union sent to Mars two robotic space probes launched within nine days of each other—Mars 2 and Mars 3. Neither space...

Mercury 13: The Women Who Almost Became Astronauts

Jul 20, 2021

If everything goes as planned, a few hours from now, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would blast off into space aboard the suborbital space vehicl...

The Oldest Orbiting Satellite

Jul 7, 2021

When a satellite is launched into space it is not expected to last forever. The satellite carries on board a limited amount of fuel which wi...

Why Apollo Astronauts Lobbed Grenades on The Moon

May 24, 2021

The Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s provided scientists with an exciting playground upon which to conduct experiments never performed i...

Russia’s Hand-Tossed Satellites

Apr 19, 2021

On November 3, 1997, cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov and Anatoly Solovyov were spacewalking outside the Mir space station to remove an old solar ...

Why The Soviet Union Lied About Yuri Gagarin's Historic Space Flight

Apr 12, 2021

Exactly sixty years ago, on April 12, 1961, Vostok 1 took off from Baikonur Cosmodrome taking along cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the first ever...

How Astronomer Percival Lowell Mistook His Own Eye For Spokes on Venus

Feb 2, 2021

Percival Lowell, the American astronomer whose name bears an observatory in Arizona, made several very significant observations of the plane...

The Space Museum Inside a Church

Oct 13, 2020

About 80 km outside of Kyiv, in the small Ukrainian town of Pereyaslav-Khmelnytskyy, there is a large complex of museums dedicated to preser...