Andrew: Armstrong's flight that you refer to was in 1968, not 71. It mentions that in the sources you cite at the end of the article.

This is a great question. My ideal reader would be android powered so I can access my Amazon (my wife has a kindle), B&N (I had a nook) and Google (I have an android tablet and phone) accounts and read from all three.

Best candy bar in the history of mankind. I buy a case whenever I go to Canada.

Hey Andrew, this section:

Static is part of it, but it's also about foreign objects and debris, even bacterial growth. A lot of it's driven by the fact that once you get up there, a piece of foil from gum that fell behind a control panel might float up and inadvertently cause a short circuit, whereas on the ground, it would just sit there.…

Woah...mind.. blown...

Is anybody else weirded out by the fact that there are people without life support backpacks in these pics?

We call it the Doberman Cycle at our house...

An oldie but a goodie: Shadworun

What I think is most interesting is that none of the human crewed vehicles look anything like they did in real life... the Vostok's launched on an R-7 which looks much like the current Soyuz series. These look more like R-1's (the Soviet version of the the German V-2) and the capsules, while covered in an aerodynamic…

Related side note, and admittedly something of a shill for where I work... The kids in the cast came to Space Camp and Aviation Challenge near Marshall Space Flight Center to do a team building program!

Man, this is one of the worst researched articles I've read in a long time. Let's start with you completely forgetting Gus Grissom's Mercury splash-down, where his capsule sank to the bottom of the oceean... and then there was Soyuz 1, where Komarov, the poor bastard, ended up a greasy spot in the flaming wreckage of…

Correct! It's two rotors. Jet engines require "Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Twist, Blow", which gives you that nice flamey end you don't want anywhere near your pant legs.

They had some theories, but Explorer I in 1958 was the first to really prove anything about the radiation belts (van Allen was a big part of designing that payload). Otherwise, physicists had already established that the sun had weather and that the Aurorae were connected to that somehow. I would agree though that…

If I remember right, the cannon they used was recoil-less. And it was really more of a large-ish rifle than cannon. I'd be willing to bet they did some fancy venting of the exhaust gasses from the charge to neutralize itself and counteract the mass ejection of the slug.

The numbers on the wikipedia article look pretty solid to me. Aldrin may also have been off, though he is a smart guy (regardless of how much he may or may not be a douche). He was a big part of developing the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous method for the Apollo missions.

True! :)

I don't mean they lose weight after staging, I mean the Saturn V design underwent tweaks to decrease the overall weight between missions. The one that launched Apollo 15 was a lighter vehicle than the one that launched Apollo 11.

Interesting discrepancey... I can think of two possible reasons: 1) The Wikipedia may article gives stats until engin out... but the booster coasted a bit after engine out. Not sure that would be enough to make up the two inches though. 2) The Saturns underwent weightloss as the missions progressed (inlcuding the…

Indeed! Though that's Dryden in California, and not Kennedy, like they make it seem in the show.