News reports in China have stated that the Chinese are will attempt to join the nations capable of sending humans into space on October 15, a day after the meeting of Communist party members. The Shenzhou 5 spacecraft will carry a single astronaut (or yuhangyuan) into space for a single 90-minute loop around the Earth. It appears the Chinese are going to be very conservative on their first launch attempt, essentially matching the flight that Yuri Gagarin made more than 40 years ago. There hasn’t been an official launch announcement from the government yet.
When I heard about this I felt an amused twinge of envy. Over the last…
The Hubble Space Telescope has gone through its share of gyroscopes in its 34-year history…
Any event in the cosmos generates gravitational waves, the bigger the event, the more disturbance.…
During the Space Race, scientists in both the United States and the Soviet Union investigated…
The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to…
Space travel and exploration was never going to be easy. Failures are sadly all too…