Category: space race

We’re always a wee bit suspicious about articles that announce some sort of “World’s first” accomplishment. With a couple of hundred thousand years of history, most of which wasn’t recorded, over which something like 117 billion humans have lived, any claims of primacy have to be taken with a grain of salt. So when the […]
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 […]
On this date in 1975, a Soviet and an American shook hands. Even for the time period, this wouldn’t have been a big deal if it wasn’t for the fact that it happened approximately 220 kilometers (136 miles) over the surface of the Earth. Crew of the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project Although their spacecraft actually launched […]
Ever since humans came up with the bright idea to explore parts of the Earth which were significantly less hospitable to human life than the plains of Africa where humankind evolved, there’s been a constant pressure to better protect ourselves against the elements to keep our bodies comfortable. Those first tests of a new frontier […]
In the fall of 1957, it seemed as though the United States’ space program would never get off the ground. The USSR had launched Sputnik in October, and this cemented their place in history as the first nation in space. If that weren’t bad enough, they put Sputnik 2 into orbit a month later. By […]
As the prospects for Germany during the Second World War began to look increasingly grim, the Nazi war machine largely pinned their hopes on a number of high-tech “superweapons” they had in development. Ranging from upgraded versions of their already devastatingly effective U-Boats to tanks large enough to rival small ships, the projects ran the gamut […]