Humans will return to the moon next year, more than 30 years after the last Apollo astronauts left. Unfortunately, the new lunar visitors will have a large handicap that will hinder their exploration efforts: they’ll all be dead. The humans in questions will arrive in the form of small amounts of ashes from cremated remains, …
Tag: space
Space: what’s NExT?
I’m a child of the Space Age, born a year and a half after Sputnik. Apollo 11 landed on the moon on my 10th birthday; Viking landed on Mars on my 17th. There is no doubt in my mind that if the human race is to survive, we must move out into space, to make …
Extrasolar planets
The idea that planets orbit most of the stars in the universe has such a firm hold on our imagination, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, that most people are surprised to hear we only found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995, and proof of other solar systems (stars with more than one planet …
Space propulsion
It’s been more than 40 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, and, in the process, traveled faster than any human before. Today, we continue to send humans into orbit…where they travel at pretty much the same speed. Oh, sure, unmanned spacecraft have traveled much faster, and so did …
Taikonauts
On April 1, a spacecraft capable of carrying three people into orbit returned safely to Earth. That may not sound like news after 40 years of manned spaceflights, but this was a very special spacecraft: it was Chinese. Shenzhou (Heavenly Vessel) 3 carried instrumented mannequins instead of humans, but its success makes it more …
Asteroids, again
On March 8 an asteroid between 40 and 80 meters in diameter passed with 480,200 kilometres of Earth. No one saw it until four days later. In 1908, something about the same size blasted into the atmosphere above the Tungaska forest in Siberia in 1908 and exploded with force of 15 million tons of TNT, …
Canadians vie for the X-Prize
Human beings have been going into space for 40 years, riding vast amounts of U.S. or Russian government money, poured into massive rockets that are mostly thrown away after one use. But many people think this is a terrible way to go into space. If we want to make space truly accessible (at a cost …
Adapting to space
In the movies, spaceships have artificial gravity, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to film that way. Real-life astronauts aren’t so lucky. The men and women who inhabit the Mir space station spend months in weightlessness. Sure, it’s a lot of fun–flying around, leaving objects hanging in mid-air–but inside those cosmonauts’ and astronauts’ …
Liberty Bell 7
On July 21, 1961, Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom, 33, a decorated fighter pilot, was strapped into the tiny Mercury space capsule he’d nicknamed Liberty Bell 7 and launched into space aboard a Redstone rocket. The U.S.’s first manned spaceflight, Alan Shepard 15-minute sub-orbital flight, had occurred just 2 1/2 months before. Grissom’s mission was nearly …
A new solar system
The idea that planets orbit most of the stars in the universe has such a firm hold on our imagination, thanks to Star Trek and Star Wars, that most people are surprised to hear we only found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995. Only this past week have we confirmed the existence …
Rockets
I have vivid memories from when I was a kid in Texas of travelling out into the countryside to watch my oldest brother and his friends launch rockets. This wasn’t some ’60s radicals’ attempt to overthrow the government of Swisher County, but a new hobby called model rocketry. The rockets came in all sizes, from …
The solar system
Voyager 1, now in interstellar space, sent back a final present a few years ago: a “family portrait” of the solar system, showing a shrunken sun and several tiny flecks of light–the planets. One of those flecks, a tiny blue dot, is the Earth. The past 20-some years has seen an explosion in planetary knowledge …