Category: Space Exploration

  • Dragon Eye

    John F. Lindner

    “Resilience rises! Not even gravity contains humanity when we explore as one for all.” My eyes were glued to NASA-TV last weekend as I followed the flight of the SpaceX Dragon “Resilience” to the International Space Station. Ferrying a diverse Crew 1 of Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi for a six-month…

  • Flying Silo

    John F. Lindner

    Yesterday, SpaceX successfully flew a full-sized Starship tank-section prototype at its launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Standing thirty meters tall without its nosecone, weighing one to two hundred tons with methalox propellant, and made from stainless steel, Starship was powered by a single Raptor engine, the first full-flow staged-combustion engine to fly. Operational Starships…

  • The Tall Towers

    John F. Lindner

    In 1945, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?” in Wireless World magazine. Clarke calculated a special orbit, about 36 000 km above the equator with a period of one sidereal day, in which artificial satellites would appear to hover motionless above Earth. The satellites…

  • Intrepid-Surveyor

    John F. Lindner

    Fifty years ago, Apollo 12 landed within sight of another spacecraft, a dramatic demonstration of pinpoint landing capability. While Dick Gordon orbited Luna in the command module Yankee Clipper, Pete Conrad and Al Bean left the lunar module Intrepid and walked over to the robotic Surveyor, which had landed over two years earlier. They retrieved…

  • Stainless Steel Starship

    John F. Lindner

    Welders in a Texas swamp have built a starship. But don’t bet against SpaceX. Starship is a prototype upper stage for a next-generation, fully reusable, two-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle designed to enable the human exploration of the solar system and the colonization of Mars. It’s made from stainless steel. (A little carbon converts iron to hard steel;…

  • After the Moonwalk

    John F. Lindner

    Iconic is Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Buzz Aldrin during the first moon walk, with Armstrong reflected in Aldrin’s visor. Much less well-known is this pair of photographs taken just after the moon walk. To my eyes, Armstrong seems exhausted but happy; Aldrin seems satisfied … and over his shoulder, almost casually, is a window, and…

  • “Contact Light”

    John F. Lindner

    Our TV is broken, so Aunt Nora invites us to her apartment. (Aunt Nora isn’t really our aunt, but she introduced our parents to each other, so that’s what we call her.) My brother Jim and I lie on the floor close to the TV, while the adults sit on the couch. We watch NBC…

  • Black Hole Radii

    John F. Lindner

    I set the alarm for 8:55 AM. Brutal, but I wanted to watch live the National Science Foundation Event Horizon Telescope news conference. I was expecting the first image of a black hole, and the EHT team did not disappoint. But the black hole was not the Milky Way’s Sgr A*, but M87*, a thousand…

  • Dr. Rendezvous

    John F. Lindner

    Edwin Aldrin earned his PhD from MIT in 1963 with a thesis titled, “Line-of-sight guidance techniques for manned orbital rendezvous”. Just three years later in 1966, Aldrin was the pilot of Gemini XII, the last flight of the Gemini program, a critical precursor to the Apollo moon program. Aldrin and his commander James Lovell were…

  • Moon Dance

    John F. Lindner

    I ran up the stairs to Studio Art. Justine was already rolling out the treadmill, so I climbed another flight of stairs to the old running track and let down both ends of the steel cable, one end connected to the harness and the other to the sandbag counterweight. Our reduced gravity rig was basically…

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