Articles tagged with "space"

Although the chemicals in rocket propulsion have changed over the years, from kerosene and liquid hydrogen, to complex ammonium perchlorate compounds and more recently liquid methane and oxygen, the basic idea of how it all works is the same - following Newton's idea of action and reaction (or conservation of momentum), if you shove stuff out the back of a rocket, it pushes the rocket forward. The more mass you shove out, and the faster it's shoved, the quicker the rocket moves.

Are we going to get trapped on earth by a swarm of colliding space debris?

On 27 January POTUS (the President Of The United States) signed an executive order to create an “Iron Dome” of defence against ballistic, hypersonic, cruise missiles and other advanced aerial attacks. This was renamed “Golden Dome for America” on 24 February. Surprisingly, the renaming isn't about POTUS' preference for golden things. Apparently “Iron Dome” is a registered trademark, owned by an Israeli defence firm.

We certainly live in exciting times. There's been recent news about some potentially exciting discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

In my last newsletter I wrote about the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. Post launch there were many operations that it had to go through to be successfully deployed, the most major of which included its unfolding.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has successfully launched!

The Chinese launch vehicle - Long March 5B has been in the news over the past week. The rocket was launched at the end of last month to carry the living quarters of China's independent space station into orbit.

Lockdown made me think of what it would be like to travel to Mars. Stuck in familiar confines, the same people around every day. The same food. A slowly diminishing blue marble the only vibrant object in a black sky hung with tiny white stars.

Robert Bigelow is convinced that aliens are not only real, but they have visited earth and are living on our planet. He believes that his grandparents were visited by an alien craft, and says that he has spent millions gathering evidence that aliens are among us. People have pointed out that his company Bigelow Aerospace's logo looks a lot like the head of a "gray" - the most popular depiction of an alien, with big almond shaped eyes and a teardrop face.

Noel Townsley shares what he learnt at UFOs and their Spiritual Mission, a conference held by Share International NZ at Mt Eden Village Centre, Auckland.

Hosted by Fraser Cain of AstronomyCast, this hour long magazine-style show takes listeners through the previous week's space news. Each episode has an assortment of guests who take it in turns to present, each with their own topic, and with Fraser asking the questions and expanding the stories. Each week a cast of regular voices tend to appear, and there's a wider community of more infrequent guests.

For almost half a century, it's seemed like human destiny to go into Space. When we were kids, everyone wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up. The loss of the Columbia space shuttle hasn't extinguished that dream, but it firmly reminds us that leaving the Earth behind is a very difficult thing to do. If things were just a little bit different - if our species were as big as elephants, or aquatic, or if the Earth's gravity were much stronger, it may have been impossible. As it is, raising a human being into low Earth orbit, to say nothing of going further, is a hugely expensive proposition. And once up there, the lack of gravity leads to muscle wasting and other physiological problems. Food and air also need to be brought up from the planet below.

The Evening Post, 31 August 1987

An Auckland astrologer who predicted the space shuttle accident says the American space shuttle accident says the American space programme will face further disasters this year.