282

I came across this list at Wikipedia (not surprisingly, about spaceflight).  It lists *every* human spaceflight since April 12, 1961 (Vostok 1).  And the total surprised me: 282 Only 282 flights with humans in over 49 years.  Less than 6 per year on average.  This includes 3 flights from the X-15 program and 3 flights […]

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The Earth and the Moon

@NASAhistory just posted to twitter that this pictures was taken 33 years ago today: I love pictures like this, the Earth and the Moon in one frame.  This image was taken by Voyager 1, the first to look back from such a distance (7,250,000 miles away), and the right equipment, that the Earth and Moon […]

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NASA Tweetup

NASA announces tweet up to view the launch of Atlantis.  NASA will pick 150 people at random that sign up on their site. Hrm, I’ll be signing up — and if I’m one of the 150 picked — I think that’s too good of a deal to pass up.  There’s also a second place tweet […]

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Flying Free

Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was pretty neat.  It was an astronaut grabbing a rather large satellite in an untethered spacewalk. The picture doesn’t capture really what’s happening here.  The satellite is rotating while being captured.  The video shows this better. Shannon couldn’t believe what she was seeing.  “Is he crazy!” seems like what […]

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“Sometimes doing nothing is the best option”

Great post by NASA’s Wayne Hale on his blog regarding conjuctions, or close encounters between the Space Shuttle and space junk.  When a conjunction is going to occur during the crew sleep period and there is sufficient reason to believe there will not be a collision, mission controllers will set a timer to expire at […]

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Ares I-X Rollout

I tried to stay up to watch the start of the rollout live – scheduled for 12:01AM this morning, but it got delayed about an hour, so I’m glad I didn’t.  The last bit of the rollout is happening right now. Someone on the nasaspaceflight.com forum this morning noted that the last rocked to rollout […]

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Spaceflight, Helicopters, and Nomads

Before launches at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Helicopters search the downrange path of rockets to find any nomads in the vast grasslands of Kazakhstan.  If any are found they are warned of the upcoming launches. Link This picture of this activity was particularly interesting: (image from russianspaceweb.com, copyright noted) The americans launch with ocean downrange. […]

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Ares

One of the things I’ve been looking forward to recently is the rollout (on 10/20) and the launch (scheduled for 10/27) of  Ares I-X: NASA’s first test flight of the new rockets in support of the Constellation Program (created by Bush II in his Vision for Space Exploration). It’s been exciting to read about the […]

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