Recently in History Category

While the pre-Apollo Wernher von Braun manned Mars mission plan is well known through the Collier's magazine and von Braun's now published Project Mars: A Technical tale, the German born rocket engineer also developed long range plans for the Nixon administration that included a 1982 manned Mars mission



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HAL-9000: What is going to happen?
Ghost of David Bowman: Something wonderful
Film: 2010 Odyssey Two (1984)

There are only eight days left now in Flight's 100 Greatest vote and it is fair to say that each category is going to be an extremely close run thing

Although the obvious nominations are popular (Moon Landing, Wright Brothers etc), there is still ample opportunity for some surprises when the final list is revealed during the Farnborough Air Show

So have some fun checking out the nominations from everyday people and NASA astronauts that can be seen at airspace.aero  and maybe you'll want to vote for SpaceShipOne or X-15 or even SpaceX's Dragon?  

There has been plenty of myth making by the UK media in the past week as they fall hook, line and sinker for the New Labour government's spin on human spaceflight and the UK

Just as the British monarchic Tudor dynasty of Henry VIII fame loved the King Arthur of the ancient past - Henry had a deceased older brother named after the mythical King of the Britons - this government likes to link itself to the improbable future of Brits in space

For those of you living in the US your PBS network had a documentary about military space programmes you could have watched yesterday

Well if you missed it, watch the clip above and maybe you can find it at your local DVD store sometime soon. Here's the promotional blurb I was sent that went with the documentary anyway

"On Tuesday, February 12, NOVA will present the premiere of "Astrospies," an inside look at the covert space programs that hid in the shadows of the 1960s space race. We think readers of Hyperbola will be interested in the show, and we hope you'll consider posting about it!

Amid the countdowns, launches, splashdowns, and parades that heralded the race to the moon, both the United States and the Soviet Union ran quiet campaigns to launch military astronauts on spying missions. Highly classified for decades, these top-secret missions might easily have triggered a shooting war in orbit. In "Astrospies," NOVA travels to Russia for exclusive access to cosmonauts and their restricted space facility and obtains candid first-time interviews with American astronauts in the Air Force-run military space program."

I'd like to add I like PBS because it has lots of British television programmes on it, always a nice alternative to the 500 channels the US hotels have that show adverts with short clips of an alleged drama inbetween

Hobbyspace.com and Personal Spaceflight provided year-end reviews and links to year-end reviews about all sorts and space tourism

And from the Flight archive here is another cutaway, this time the NASA Skylab that operated from May 1973 to February 1974

And read this nine-page report by Flight from 1973 all about Skylab and continue to watch video

This cutaway is from the Flight archives

And here you can read the 1961 Flight report about the Vostock ground station control centre