Iran has entered the Space race!

 Three satellites on one ICBM?

The United States was the first nation to condemn Iran for their achievement of possibly putting up their own spy satellite with two others and what this will mean for the years ahead in mapping and communications having not to rely on others, but there is much more to this success and that will include a manned mission a robot, if not a manned landing on the Moon and much more!

Space is now more complicated than it was fifty years ago with the Moon landings, real or not since there is some doubt how the U.S. got there when we are struggling with our modern tech to do the same?

China and India are leading the way, while Japan has gone its own way and all have proved to be doing and discovering new things that Russia and the U.S. don't want to do, but in the years to come much will be achieved as we exhaust the discoveries within our solar system, even the distant worlds still to be observed beyond Pluto/

Private ventures by Elon Musk will be amazing in going to the outer gas giants, while Boeing has developed and new Space shuttle and Space tourism is some venture for the near future as the ISS is coming to the end of its thirty-year life and the possibility of more than one Moon base becomes a reality?

A year or two of Changes!

 COVID-19 has changed Everything?

Sickness, lockdown, uncertainty and having to close down our website has taken its toll, but we are back and are hoping to kick on, if not also catch up slowly?

There are many changes because of this Pandemic in travel, transport and technology from medical to the factory floor and sadly many of our older friends and family have succumb to this lack of air disease!

We are moving into space tourism and from electric battery possibilities to gas, but it was Russia who lead the way or already have done it as well as being so advanced in robotics that they are now fitted and operating on the ISS!

Yet the west and Europe still maintains that S-Korea and Japan are the future for these developments, when they are not apart from gaming and even Canada is now responsible for most of that?

The U.S. a new path in Space?

Russia maybe Excluded?

NASA is being guided by the Trump administration into a new path of Space research and travel that breaks the long established cooperation! Currently the U.S still needs the Russians passage and re-supply to the International Space Station, but the new Gateway programme will see them be cut back to just one module in the whole project?

Artemis is the new project to return to the Moon to establish a south pole base that will lead eventually to getting humans on Mars by 2030? The sad thing is that many other nations such as China and Indi might pull it off with the Russians in a direct flight and return?

Off to the Moon! Part-Two.

Stepping Stones?

It is still not known if the U.S. government will keep the International Space station going in favour of commitments to a New Moon base, but what is clear this will be part of the next step to go on to establishing something more permanent  on Mars?

Claims of six to thirty years are still the various estimated times for such missions, commercially it might be six years to pull off a stunt, but to be serious thirty is more practicable since many things still require testing and approval?

With the recent discovery of water on the poles of the Moon, this will encourage the base plans to go ahead perhaps within the next six years, but keeping ISS has a half-way point would be wise in the initial stages of this vast project!

Off to the Moon! Part-One.

The Trump Mission?

For humanity to return to the Moon will cost billions if not trillions and something will have to give way, so it has been decided that the International Space station will have to go within the next few years? 

The United States of America is determined to beat China getting to the Moon in this next fifteen year period and the U.S. wants to do what JF Kennedy pressured NASA to do forty years ago, but with a base rather than just landing and coming home!

The problems with this are enormous, if their is no Space station as a stepping stone on these proposed missions! The ISS has at least another twenty good years of operational service and Russia will perhaps have to foot the bill for its replacement?

A Moon base may never really become that stepping stone to Mars as is being promised, to maintain it will be very difficult even with 6% gravity over that of none? Trump wants to undermine the Kennedy legacy as much as he is doing politically to Obamas!

Elon Musk!

In trouble over a failed Launch?

Space is still a tricky business we may be able to launch rockets weekly up the International Space Station as well military spying, but from time to time there will be failures since humans are not perfect and make mistakes?

Musk has promised much in relation to taking men back to the Moon after forty years and reaching to Mars, with his new re-usable rockets? But this is still new and untested systems that need to be fine-lined, even the Space Shuttle still had teething problems that NASA failed to address at the cost of precious scientific lives for the prestige!

We are only sixty-one years into the Space race exploration, man has reached Pluto and now beyond! Gone to the Moon and built several Space stations culminating in the ISS! Soviet Russia/Russia and the United States were the first to dominate this race from 1957!

But now other nations have now joined this Space club, China, Japan, Europe, India, Israel and more are coming along such as Brazil, Nigeria and Iran!

48 to 8 Hours.

Getting up to the Space Station.

Twenty years ago it took just over two days to get up to the Russian MIR Space station, this week we saw the three way Russian, ESA, U.S. mission do it in less than eight hours even with a technical fault. What amazing achievements with the tried and tested second generation MM Soyuz-Progress vehicles over that of the flamboyant yet very dangerous U.S. Space shuttle.

Timings into space are speeding up, while duration flights of just over one year at the moment cuts a possible manned trip to Mars in the next 30 years. The joint Moon base, will perhaps prepare us for that giant return trip to Mars, in say 50 years from now. 

There remains so many dangers in space travel, after nearly 58 years from Sputnik, that the next 50 will give us enough time to develop better space ships perhaps between the ISS and the Moon base. Familiarity with living their will be the key to any future Mars mission and then further out?

'Virgin Space Vehicle'

Richard Branson is a man who is making his mark on history and why not. It is his dream to see space flight in near earth orbit as a reality for everyone. Branson has also been the man who wants to re-vitalize the Concorde and supersonic travel. 

The continued development of the inner orbit vehicle will be the first of a generation, this century anyway of more designs and perhaps one day even the defunct Space shuttle too will allow commercial travel into space. Current space stations such as the ISS could be developed into a type pleasure station, or perhaps flights to a moon base or something further afield.

These are the first steps to the future of space travel. What will be the answers to all this in one hundred years from now?

Star Ships.

Space the final frontier.

When are we going to build a real space ship? It is unlikely to be in the near future, but plans are underway to send a mission to Mars and the Asteroid belt within the next fifty-years. The development of some form of long-range endurance ship will have to be designed and constructed probably in space near to the ISS. 

This space ship will not be as dramatic or spectacular as the ships of popular science-fiction, such as the Enterprise or Destiny in Star gate universe.

UAV...

Unmanned Ariel Vehicle.

The history of this type of aircraft, began in World-War-II (1939-45) when Nazi-Germany under the Dictatorship of Adolf Hitler demanded a series of vengeance weapons to be designed and built in secret if all else failed in his Axis conflict. It was the Von Braun (designer of the U.S. Saturn rocket and the Space shuttle) team who initially came up with the V-1 flying bomb (known in the UK as the doodle bug). 

After the war in 1945 both Russia and the U.S. made a mad race to capture as much German technology, and so work started on the modern family of unmanned aircraft we today see being deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to take out militant and terrorist strongholds.

Israel over the years has built up its series of unmanned aircraft in it Scout and rangers, which much smaller than the U.S. counterparts but do the same jobs. This technology in combination with satellite guidance, saves troops on the ground, but it also has been adopted into civil aircraft flight systems, the various space programmes, Mar's lander's and the ISS.

ISS.

(International Space Station).

Today the world has the ISS a space station with many space partners. Predominately the U.S., Europe (ESA), Russia, Japan. We can observe this object very easily from earth and millions of people look at it each night as it flies over some part of our planet.

The craft is the largest object yet put into space by humanity, but its roots came out of the cold war period space race between the former Soviet Union and the United states of America. Leaving aside that race we just want to concentrate on the history of space stations and it was the Russians who first launched a series of Soyuz ships. They were small and cramped, but the Russians started to build up manned flight hours from them. Even after they did not achieve the moon landings, they continued on with this plan.

The U.S. launched their Space Lab, but the U.S. did not seem to move on from there for some time. Eventually they had a link up between a Soyuz and the Skylab. The Russians moved on to develop a much bigger Soyuz, known as the Mir. This was technically the end for the Russians in space station building.

The ISS now replaces both previous systems, which were probably used for spying on each other. This new platform has improved on both countries technologies and has become a laboratory for various scientific experimentation and discovery.