The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project On July 24, 1975, six years to the day after the Apollo 11 crew returned safely to Earth, reaching the zenith of America’s space race program, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project crew returned to Earth. It was to be the last hurrah of the Apollo era....

Launching the By-Products of Nuclear Power into Space The hundred years that made up the twentieth century was full of tremendous innovation and technological progress, but it was also littered with bad ideas.  It is said that “necessity is the mother of invention,” and where there is a problem,...

Nixon Wakes Up NASA in the Middle of a Dream   How often is it that we talk about the “golden era” of something? Generally, that tends to infer that the best of something is behind us. It doesn’t mean that great things won’t, or can’t be accomplished in...

It was the middle of March when President Donald Trump mentioned the prospect of creating a new branch of the military, a “Space Force.”  It was immediately the subject of ridicule and conjured up visions of Star Wars Stormtroopers with laser guns fighting galactic battles in space. Once again,...

In April of 1972, John Young and Charlie Duke landed Apollo 16, the next to last Apollo lunar mission, in the Descartes highlands. It was during one of the moonwalks that the word came from Mission Control in Houston – Congress had approved the NASA budget for fiscal year 1973...

It did not take long to figure out that the concept of ferrying the shuttle like an airplane between ground destinations was not going to fly.  The numbers just were not adding up, but the risk factors were rising.  The idea was to install six airbreathing jet engines beneath...

If the shuttle could not fly itself across the country then how do you get a spacecraft that weighs as much as a Boeing 757 from California to Florida? One idea proposed by Lockheed was to “tow” the Orbiter behind a C-5. This method would be used to ferry the vehicle...

The bragging rights to carry the Shuttle on its back came down to the Air Force’s C-5 and Boeing’s 747. The C-5 was a potential budget buster for NASA. It was a large and expensive aircraft that entered production in 1968.  The initial version of the aircraft had developed problems with...

In November of 1962, the Grumman company headquartered in Bethpage,  New York  won the contract to build the Lunar Module that first carried American astronauts to the Moon. Grumman, a well known defense contractor famous for navy fighter aircraft wanted to be a part of the coming race to space, but they...

Thirty three times the Space Shuttle Atlantis journeyed into space before finally coming to rest and now on permanent display at the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex.  I have been down to KSC many times over the years and I have seen Atlantis launch, land, and I walked under...