It is over complicating it a bit to worry about the influences of the other bodies. They do influence, but…
After a 15 hour day that began with a three hour meeting and ended with a six hour software testing session that required sending 67 pages of commands. I thought I’d take a walk through the grove, before driving home.
We don’t really perceive depth when we look up at the stars and planets. They all appear to be moving across a flat plane. In the below picture, we have an inner planet and an outer planet. We can pretend they are the Earth and Mars, if we want. The inner…
The Apollo 11 command module entered the atmosphere at 16:35:05 GMT (11:35:05 Houston…
The end of January is somber at NASA. We’ve had three fatal missions and they all happened around this time. On January 27, 1967 the Apollo 1 capsule caught fire, on the pad, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. On January 28, 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded…
This week is the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. That has gotten people excited about this adventure that mankind accomplished half a century ago. That made me think it was a good time to share some of my favorite books on…
Planets (usually) shouldn’t look like stars (unless they are near the horizon). If they do, a visit to an optometrist might be in order.
A Mission Control Center (MCC) is a facility from which personnel operate remote resources needed to conduct a mission. In the case of NASA, that usually means a spacecraft. Below is a picture of MCC-H, the NASA Mission Control Center for the International Space Station…
For millennia our species has looked up at the moon and imagined walking on its surface. Almost 2000 years ago, a writer…
