The Apollo 1 fire might be the most horrific accident in NASA history. While it didn’t claim as many lives as either of the shuttle disasters, the gruesome death of three Apollo astronauts during a test on the ground is still shocking, 45 years later.
Category: Space
On Falling Russian Spacecraft
As we all wait to see if we’ll be flattened by the 13-ton Russian Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, take some time to read about Soyuz 1, which killed cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in 1966, when it hit the ground with a force of 2.8 tons.
New Gemini Photo Archive
As someone who downloaded the entire GRIN collection, I am super excited about this new photo archive.
The Gemini missions don’t get nearly enough attention, in my opinion.
NASA Launches Open Source Projects
NASA:
Today we are launching code.nasa.gov, the latest member of the open NASA web family. Through this website, we will continue, unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.
Eight Years of Roving
The golf-cart-size Spirit rover landed on the Red Planet eight years ago today (Jan. 3). Its twin, Opportunity, touched down three weeks later, on Jan. 25, 2004. The two robots were originally supposed to spend 90 days searching for signs of past water activity on Mars.
They found plenty of such evidence, dramatically reshaping scientists’ understanding of the Red Planet and its history. And the rovers just kept chugging along, continuing to make observations years after their warranties expired. NASA declared Spirit dead just last year, and Opportunity is still going strong.
I propose this set of rovers may be the best-designed thing mankind has ever built.
NASA Shuts Down Discovery
28 years of history just got unplugged.
The NASA Astrovan
Romanians Love Hacking NASA
Falling on the Moon
Russian Mars-Bound Probe Stuck in Earth Orbit
The craft successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 9 November (Moscow time), and separated from its Zenit–2 booster rocket some 11 minutes later. But its engines failed to kick in, and it’s now trapped in Earth’s orbit.
The Russian space agency says that it now has three days to correct the probe’s fault remotely, turn on its engines and break out of Earth’s orbit, before the £105-million craft’s batteries run dry.
Whoops.
Shame on You, NASA
The elaborate mission to recover a moon rock led NASA agents to one of the most down-to-earth places: a Denny’s restaurant in Riverside County.
But at the end of the sting operation, agents were left holding a speck of lunar dust smaller than a grain of rice and a 74-year-old suspect who was terrified by armed officials.
[…]
The target, Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, asserts the lunar material was rightfully hers, having been given to her space-engineer husband by Neil Armstrong in the 1970s.
The whole story is just plain terrible.