eightface

Space battle physics

The Physics of Space Battles. It won’t really be like the dogfights or naval style battles in our scifi books, movies and television shows.

In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, [they] are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics — not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window.

Fifty years in space

An awesome infographic on 50 years of space exploration from National Geographic, although they’re using a kludgey flash viewport. Check out the full size version while it lasts.

Update: If you like that one, check out this visualization of the various mars missions.

Apollo 11 source code

The source code for the Command Module and Lunar Module has been scanned and posted online for all to enjoy.

Happy moon landing

It’s the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon. Kottke has created a giant Apollo 11 post with links to photos, videos and loads of other information related to the event. In related news, I have an copy of the Globe and Mail’s moon landing issue, which I’ve been meaning to scan for awhile. The interesting thing about it, is the front page headline which was printed in large green type.

Space monkeys

National Geographic has posted a collection of photos celebrating the 50-year anniversary of monkeys in space.

Mars with pastels

The first television images of Mars were created using pastels. Project engineers were eager to know if their instrumentation was working properly, and didn’t want to wait for the imaging lab. They printed the data out on to small strips of paper and coloured with the appropriate pastel given a certain data range.

Photos from NASA

Pretty much all of the media produced by NASA is public domain. That means you can do almost anything you want with the wealth of images available at NASA Images. In other news, efforts are being made to recover high-resolution images from the Lunar Orbiter program that was tasked with mapping the lunar surface before the Apollo missions. The ongoing recovery program is based out of an abandoned McDonald’s.

Long Duration Love Affair

Long Duration Love Affair highlights a number of beautiful abstract photos resulting from NASA’s LDEF project.

Lost in Space

Lost in Space, the story of the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, radio transmissions from space and lost Russian cosmonauts.

Beautiful abstract satellite photos

Beautiful abstract satellite photos of Earth taken with NASA’s Landsat 7.