Here are some pictures from Kennedy Space Center of Space Shuttle Atlantis.    

In 2011, a person from Raytheon called me up out of the blue and asked if I wanted to be involved in a project to help eliminate space debris.  I was interested. A little background (the first): The majority of space is not really a vacuum.  There are particles pretty much everywhere in space.  The […]

Hopefully, over the past few posts, I have convinced you that using chemical rockets to get to space is a pretty horrible way of doing it. And, just as I am certain that I will continue to post about this technology, I am certain that we will continue to use them, since it is really […]

One of the big problems with rockets is their size.  They need to be truly humungous to get anything into orbit.  Interestingly, the reason for this was explained back before modern day rockets were even invented. A Russian scientist named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky described why rockets need to be really big way back around the turn of […]

In the last post, I talked about how it was basically impossible for humanity to get to another star using modern technology. For this post, I would like to talk about why that is, and why we don’t have space hotels or moon bases yet. The whole reason comes down to chemistry. The vast majority of […]

One of the interesting things about learning about thrust for a rocket, is that we can use the same types of formulas for airplanes. So, let’s take a few minutes and figure out how much fuel an airplane uses to travel from one place to another. We can also look at why airplanes fly at […]

A couple of posts ago, we discussed the idea of Newton’s Third Law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Let’s figure out how to mathematically apply that to getting a rocket off the ground and investigating how airplanes fly! The main idea with thrust is that if you throw enough stuff […]