The Perseverance rover landed on Mars recently. A star payload is a helicopter. The designers have shrewdly declared that 90% of their test objectives will be met if the helicopter actually takes off. Landing is the hard part. Anyhow, a little-known commercial funder of this little helicopter is Ben & Jerry Ice cream. Yes, the…
I was studying celestial mechanics one day. I pictured the International space Station ([ISS] – that I helped build) orbiting the earth every 90 minutes. It orbits in a plane inclined 51.6° to the equator. It orbits there instead of the originally planned 28.5° latitude of Kennedy Space Center so we could include the Russians…
Justin Cyrus, former Colorado School of Mines Student, was on the Enabled Opportunities on the Moon breakout session panel at this year’s Space Com conference in Houston, where I conducted the following interview. His father worked for Lockheed Martin, and so did his brother. Influenced by that, he has always wanted to work in the…
The most famous Apollo mission was Apollo 11; the first to land on the Moon. The next most famous was Apollo 13; because of the inflight anomaly on the way to the Moon and the Tom Hanks Movie by the same title. In between these is Apollo 12. It launched from Kennedy Space Center November…
John Glenn, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Scott Carpenter, Deke Slayton and Gordon Cooper were the Mercury Astronauts (I typed their names by memory, by the way). They were rock stars; household names (and still are in my mind). They were fighter pilots and test pilots. These pilots symbolized the highest ideals of the…