by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
This week, the space community marked two triumphant achievements, and dutifully ignored a third space-related anniversary that marked the darkest depths of depravity to which human beings can sink.
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“Wernher von Braun”
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
Deadline reports Disney+ has canceled The Right Stuff, the poorly received television adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s classic book of the same name. Unless Warner Bros. Television, which produced the series, can convince another network to fund a second season, the woebegone show will become a historical footnote about a real historical era.
I managed to catch several episodes recently, and I was profoundly unimpressed. It made going to space a rather dull affair. What were the problems? Let me count the ways.
(more…)V-2 and Sputnik
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
The first successful launch of Germany’s A-4 ballistic missile and the orbiting of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, took place 15 years and one day apart. The two achievements are related in more ways than their proximity on the calendar.
On Oct. 3, 1942, an A-4 developed by Wernher von Braun and his German Army team reached an altitude of 85 to 90 km (52.8 to 55.9 miles) after launch from Peenemunde on the Baltic Coast.
(more…)On Oct. 3, 1942, space history was made in Germany. The first successful ballistic missile launch was achieved by Wernher von Braun and his team at Peenemunde, Germany. An A-4 rocket lifted off from Peenemunde, reaching an altitude of nearly 90 km (56 miles) before re-entering and crashing into the Baltic Sea about 190 km (118 miles) from its secret launch site. At a raucous celebration that evening, von Braun’s […]
Interplanetary Transport System at Enceladus. (Credit: SpaceX)
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Elon Musk’s obsession with making giant leaps forward in technology and how the approach has likely contributed to some of the company’s problems. I posited that SpaceX needs fewer leaps and more plateaus so its employees can consolidate what they have learned and get really good at it before moving on to the next level. [SpaceX: Giant Leaps, Deep Troughs But No Plateaus].
Most history texts date the beginning of the space age to Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. I believe it actually dates back even further, to a picture perfect fall day almost exactly 15 years earlier in Nazi Germany.
It was on October 3, 1942, that Wernher von Braun and his team launched the first successful ballistic missile at Peenemunde on the German Baltic coast. The rocket reached an altitude just short of 90 kilometers (56 miles), becoming the first human-made object to reach the fringes of space.