Aside from a few stand-out programs — looking at you, Star Trek — by the late 1960s, TV had already become the “vast wasteland” predicted almost a decade earlier by Newton Minnow. But for the technically inclined, the period offered no end of engaging content in the form of wall-to-wall coverage of anything and everything […]
After the fire and fury of liftoff, when a spacecraft is sailing silently through space, you could be forgiven for thinking the hard part of the mission is over. After all, riding what’s essentially a domesticated explosion up and out of Earth’s gravity well very nearly pushes physics and current material science to the breaking […]
Some hacks just tickle the brain in a very particular way. They’re, for a change, not overly engineered; they’re just elegant, anachronistic, and full of mischief. That’s exactly what [Frans] pulls off with A Gentleman’s Orrery, a tiny, simple clockwork solar system. Composed of shiny brass and the poise of 18th-century craftsmanship, it hides a […]
We love clocks, but we especially love unusual timepieces that aren’t just about showing the hour of the day. [Simone Giertz] built a flip clock moon phase tracker for a friend. While in Egypt for Cairo Maker Faire, [Giertz] and [dina Amin] found some old flip clocks at a flea market and had to have […]
As part of the payloads on the Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1) that recently touched down on the Moon, the Lunar GNNS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) has become the first practical demonstration of acquiring and tracking Earth orbital GNSS satellites. LuGRE consists of a weak-signal GNSS receiver, a high-gain L-band patch antenna the requisite amplification […]
Credit: Space Lab We have seen a recent surge of interest in whether it’s possible to grow potatoes and other plants in Martian soil, but what is the likelihood that a future (manned) lunar base could do something similar? To that end [Space Lab] is developing the LEAF project that will be part of NASA’s […]
There’s something inspiring about echos. Who among us hasn’t called out or clapped hands in a large space just to hear the sound reflected back? Radio takes this to a whole new level. You can bounce signals from buildings, aircraft, the ionisphere, or even the Moon itself. Humans have been bouncing radio waves from the […]
One of the great things about ham radio is that isn’t just one hobby. Some people like to chit chat, some like to work foreign countries, some prepare for emergencies, and there are several space-related activities. There are hundreds of different kinds of activities to choose from. Just one is moonbounce, and [Ham Radio DX] […]
If the current Administration of the United States has their way, humans will return to the surface of the Moon far sooner than many had expected. But even if NASA can’t meet the aggressive timeline they’ve been given by the White House, it seems inevitable that there will be fresh boot prints on the lunar […]
The big expense in getting people to orbit or the moon or any other space destination is the cost of escaping the Earth’s gravity. One often-proposed solution involves building a giant space elevator from some point on the Earth to orbit. That sounds great, but the reality is the materials needed to make a giant […]