Just before their re-entry, a very relieved Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert, (not Fred Haise as portrayed in the Apollo 13 movie), summed up the feelings that the Apollo 13 crew had about heir lunar module-turned-lifeboat Aquarius, whose engines and power systems had...
Most wise humans know that while we should take our roles seriously as workers, parents, carers and the like, we should not take ourselves too seriously. Nothing saps the spirit like having a po-faced professional colleague whose humourless attitude tends to get...
While some men have accused the #MeToo campaign for partly emasculating them, actually there are more serious threats to their virility – chemical ones. There has long been concern that the difficult-to-filter female hormone oestrogen in the water supply...
We joked a month or two ago that some would be wondering what Elon Musk had been smoking when they found out that the latest BFS (now called Starship) design had been deliberately changed to make it look more like Tintin’s rocket ship. Now NASA is apparently doing the...
During his stay for the IAC 2018 in Bremen, your correspondent’s German did improve slightly from his previously very limited vocab mainly learned from old war films. For example, saying “Achtung! Achtung! Spitfeuer!” is of limited use when a German train conductor is...
Ahhh…the irony. The Vega launch of the Lidar-equipped ESA satellite Aeolus (aka ADM-Aeolus), which was designed and built to measure the dynamics of strong winds, was delayed by 24 hours…err, due to strong winds. Our thanks to Seradata’s Phil Hylands for pointing...
