spaceflight

Chris Knight's avatar

A Japanese firm is offering weddings in space beginning next year, and now officials with both state-sponsored space agencies and private corporations are beginning to openly concede that sexual intercourse beyond the confines of the Earth is going to happen… if it hasn’t already (NASA is tight-lipped about whether it’s taken place on the International Space Station or a shuttle flight).

Of especially great concern is what will happen on a long-term mission, like the ones now in the planning stages for a manned flight to Mars, or even an extended stay on something as relatively close by as the Moon. Space experts agree that humans are, by nature, beings who require sexual activity and expression in order to remain both emotionally and physically healthy. In more than forty years of forays into space, we’ve learned how to deal with just about every other human physiological need… and ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

One of the biggest achievements in human history took place 50 years ago today on October 4th, 1957. That was the day that the Soviet Union launched Спутник-1, better known to we in the western world as “Sputnik 1” (it means “Co-Traveler 1”), the first artificial satellite to be launched into Earth orbit.

For something about the size of a beach ball, Sputnik raised a hella big furor back in the day, especially for Americans. Cartoons such as the one on the right bemoaned the fact that the Russians could now put something in the sky right over the United States and there wasn’t anything that could be done about it. My personal favorite cartoon from the time was one where a Russian dude is telling an American woman “Who else can give you a moon?” Less than a month later the Soviets triumphed again when they launched Sputnik ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I wonder if I’ll get a “cease and desist” from the U.S. government for posting this amazingly detailed cutaway diagram of the Saturn V rocket. Slashdot is reporting that NASA is censoring information about the Saturn V launch vehicle.

How much information? Well, there are reports that NASA is ordering the confiscation and destruction of Saturn V posters that were purchased at gift shops at Kennedy Space Center and other NASA facilities. And now UpShip.com, a website that’s loaded with technical specs and blueprints of various air and spacecraft, has been sent a warning from officials at NASA’s Export Control Office that files pertaining to the Saturn V the site has on this page are in violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). That’s the list of things that the federal government doesn’t allow to be disseminated because it classifies them as “weapons”.

So of course, ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Walter M. Schirra Jr., better known as “Wally” Schirra, has passed away at the age of 84.

Schirra was one of the original seven NASA astronauts, tapped from hundreds of candidates to be part of the Mercury program. He flew the Sigma 7 craft in 1962 and then a few years later commanded Gemini 6 as it rendezvoused with Gemini 7: the first such encounter between two spacecraft and a technical test for what would later be required during the Apollo series. The third and final time Schirra went into space was in 1968 with Apollo 7, the first manned launch of the Apollo vehicle.

Of the original seven Mercury astronauts, only John Glenn and Scott Carpenter are still with us....

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