Issue #5 (January 2014)
How the Skylon fleet would operate
A fleet of Skylon vehicles can operate from a spaceport. A Vehicle Loading Hall receives and processes payloads which are installed in the Skylon payload bay. Skylon is then towed to the spaceport’s Refuelling Apron. Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen propellants are loaded through connections in the wheel wells. Skylon is towed to the runway for …
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No…it’s a spaceplane!
Vocabulary • Latitude: The number of degrees north (or south) from the equator. • Orbital Altitude: The height above Mean Sea Level of an orbiting spacecraft. • Orbital Inclination: The angle that an orbit makes as it crosses the equator. Narrative Across the pond is an innovative rocket company that toils away in relative obscurity …
NASA Spinoffs for transportation
Charged with carrying the human race to frontiers distant and challenging, it only makes sense that NASA has had a profound impact on transportation. Since its founding in 1958, NASA’s pioneering research has advanced aeronautics and other modes of transportation as well. Through partnerships with private industry, NASA expertise and technologies developed for space travel are leading to …
Liftoff for ESA’s billion-star surveyor
ESA’s Gaia is destined to create the most accurate map yet of the Milky Way. By making accurate measurements of the positions and motions of 1% of the total population of roughly 100 billion stars, it will answer questions about the origin and evolution of our home Galaxy. The Gaia mission blasted off the morning …
Ghostly specter haunts ‘coldest place in universe’
At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang nebula is the coldest known object in the universe — colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, the explosive event that created the cosmos. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile have taken a …
Comets are unpredictable beasts
The media was full of talk of comets with the inaugural visit of Comet ISON C/2012 S1. It was pre-hyped as being “The Comet of the Century”, being visible in daylight etc, etc. The reality of the matter is that comets are strange beasts and are rarely predictable unless they have been round a few …