Tag: space stations

Space stations, once more with feeling

  In his 1984 State of the Union Address, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced that the U.S. would build a space station, a permanently inhabited base in orbit. It’s a safe bet that Reagan would have been shocked and disbelieving had you told him that it would be 14 years before the first component …

Continue reading

Mir

I’m very much a child of the Space Age. I was born the year after Sputnik became the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, celebrated my 10th birthday on the very day that humans first set foot on the Moon, and turned 17 on the day that the first Viking lander set down on …

Continue reading

Space stations revisited

  Forget cosmic radiation, the solar flares, meteorites, re-entry: the real danger facing space exploration today is red ink. As governments drown in it, some space projects have had more narrow escapes than Luke Skywalker. Consider International Space Station Alpha. A space station is a permanent inhabited base in orbit. People have been talking about …

Continue reading

Space stations

  Having recently written about the Human Genome Initiative and the Superconducting Super Collider, it behooves me to write about the third “big science” project now in the works, Space Station Freedom. There was some question last year whether Space Station Freedom would ever be built–the U.S. Congress was considering dropping it from the budget. …

Continue reading

Easy AdSense Pro by Unreal