Tag Archives: space-ish

Cool Space Stuff: VLEO and Electric Jets, Rocket Planes

Posted on April 5, 2025 by jlredford

Here’s a quick dump on some novel ideas: satellites in very low orbits so they can take better pictures, using electric jets to deorbit space junk, and a rocket plane with big ambitions from New Zealand! Very Low Earth Orbit … Continue reading →

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“Orbital” – A Hymn to Earth That Puts SF to Shame

Posted on November 26, 2024 by jlredford

Everyone is raving about this sort-of novel, and it’s clear why – it’s a stunning meditation on the beauty of the Earth, as seen by six astronauts on the International Space Station. Not much happens. It just follows them across … Continue reading →

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Space Has Become Cheap

Posted on July 23, 2023 by jlredford

I was talking with a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute recently, and he mentioned a new project he had to track penguins. From space. With his own personal satellite. These days you can put up a cubesat, a … Continue reading →

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Launching US Rockets From Soviet Bombers

Posted on February 4, 2022 by jlredford

In the last post I complained about how ugly the Soviet ekranoplans were. I’m glad I can now pass along a story about one of their really beautiful planes – the TU-160 supersonic bomber. It almost got used for doing … Continue reading →

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Space vs Balloon Tourism

Posted on October 22, 2021 by jlredford

After a long hiatus, space tourism came back this year. The last trip was in 2012 to the ISS, but there have recently been four trips: two sub-orbital flights by Blue Origin in July and October, one by Virgin Galactic … Continue reading →

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A Heinlein Meme Started the Space Race

Posted on October 12, 2019 by jlredford

… according to the excellent Washington Post podcast Moonrise.  It’s an account of what led up to the Apollo 11 moon landing, starting with Robert Goddard, John W. Campbell, Sergei Korolev, and Wernher von Braun in the 1920s and 30s, … Continue reading →

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Space Is Not That Big

Posted on July 31, 2019 by jlredford

So we just had the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, and there’s renewed interest in doing another landing on the Moon.  That got me thinking about space as the final frontier. How much is there out there really?  I added … Continue reading →

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Mad Science #5: Fluorine-Based Rocket Fuels

Posted on May 1, 2019 by jlredford

One of the purest examples of maniacal engineering is the field of liquid rocket fuels.   These chemicals have to contain as much energy as possible, and so are  dangerous by definition.  A fun and opinionated version of their development … Continue reading →

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Nothing Has Ever Been Manufactured in Space

Posted on February 3, 2019 by jlredford

I happen to own something that has been to space – a laptop bag made partly from the orange nylon of Soyuz re-entry parachute: A Montreal company, Everquest Design, went out to Kazahkstan in 2003 and recovered the parachute from … Continue reading →

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How Space Science Might Have Gone

Posted on May 26, 2016 by jlredford

But for an accident of history, this is how space science would have been done: This is the launch a few days ago of the Compton Spectrometer and Imager, a soft gamma-ray (0.2 to 10 MeV) telescope designed to look … Continue reading →

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