Space Forum / Space History / January 2005

The European-built Smart-1 spacecraft has sent back its first close-up  
images of the Moon, showing the cratered landscape in glorious detail.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/sci/tech/4209995.stm
Gareth

Hi everyone, sorry to bother you.
Can anyone explain to me or point me to any documentation explaining why
there are A-B-C-D painted on the Sat V Tail Fins?
Is it for ground tracking?

Well, if  Mars is "The Red Planet", then Titan is "The Yellow Moon":
http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/images/050115color.jpg
Here's the sizes of the rocks or ice blocks near the probe:
http://spaceflightnow.com/cassini/images/050115sizes.jpg

Resembling the central console column of a 1950s Soviet TARDIS...
http://tv.cream.org/extras/toys/toptoys7061.htm
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Is this not a prime example of a pulled-out-of-his-a.s Dennis Miller-style

As the Air Force looks more into stratospheric airships and other  
"near-space" vehicles, I am wondering whether such craft were seriously
proposed  or
worked on in the past (from the 1950s onward.)  There were the  balloon

Gee, who would have guessed, with trillions of barrels of hydrocarbon
products just having been discovered, that the price of gas goes *up*?

Animals compete with one another for limited resources.  This is what
drives evolutionary development.  Humans have an aspect to their
personalities that are competitive as well.  But humans have also
learned to cooperate.  This is reflected in the structure of their

Bad news, just reported on the BBC - the loss of Chain A means that
half of the predicted 700-odd pictures were not returned. They have
'maybe 330, maybe 360'.
R

I'm working on at least a semi-comprehensive list of pyrotechnic mishaps.  I
started it a while back and am picking it up again to finish.  This includes
where things go BOOM! when they are not supposed to.  Or when they don't fire
when you want them to.

While everyone talks of "seeing Sputnik," the satellite was a sixth-magnitude
object, the faintest the eye can observe from Earth.  The spent core of the R-7
booster, which also went into orbit,  was a first-magnitude object.  Many
writers on the subject, even very good ones, tend ...

(Fossilized) WHOOLY MAMMOTH;
common name for several extinct species of the elephant family ::
Fossilized Whooly Mammoth had long, curved tusks that reached a length

Everyone's favorite rocket guns:
http://www.smallarmsreview.com/pdf/Gyrojettest.PDF
Pat

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    I got my hands on the DVD collection.
    How accurate was this series? In particular, did they get
the physical events we see in the Apollo 1 fire episode correct?

Some of the net kooks are bound to notice
Pythagoras' lines are more rectilinear that the
ordinary round crater.
http://clowder.net/hop/Pythagoras410.jpg