drew@drewexmachina.com
As the old saying goes, “the third time’s the charm”. This is likely an American variation of the British phrase “third time lucky” (which itself is […]
As anyone with even a passing knowledge of spaceflight can tell you, space is an unforgiving place. While the majority of space missions launched today are […]
The Venera program was undoubtedly the most successful and best known series of Soviet planetary missions. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a succession of spacecraft […]
Today it seems that whenever one of NASA’s missions to worlds beyond our own encounters a potentially mission ending problem, teams of talented engineers and scientists […]
A half of a century after the fact, it is difficult to imagine the excitement during 1967 as NASA continued to work through its backlog of […]
Back during the days of the Apollo lunar missions, young budding space enthusiasts like myself were all aware of the trio of unmanned lunar programs which […]
While the tragic fire which killed the crew of Apollo 1 on January 27, 1967 effectively put the brakes on the Apollo program (see “The Future […]
In recent years it seems that Mars has dominated NASA’s planetary exploration program while proposals to study our twin-planet-gone-bad, Venus, are being repeatedly rejected. Something similar […]
As 1967 began, NASA had ambitious plans for the year in their push to get Apollo to the Moon. But while the tragic loss of the […]
During my first business trip to Moscow in 1996 for the RAMOS program (see “RAMOS: The Russian-American Observation Satellites”), many of my colleagues and I made […]
One of the first things a human instinctively does when seeing something interesting is to take a closer look and touch it. While this may seem […]
For those who follow the world’s space programs, it is well known that things do not always go as planned. A mission can go very wrong […]
