A List Of Top Ten Scrapped Spaceships

Discovery Space provides interesting Top 10 List of Scrapped Spaceships. Favorite designs are the Wernher Von Braun Ferry Rocket, Project Orion, an atomic spaceship, Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar and the Lockheed X-33 Venture Star. In "Almost Famous: The X-20 DynaSoar," The Living Moon article reveals: "The semi-winged DynaSoar evolved greatly. The basic idea was to lob the bird into low Earth orbit and skip across the upper atmosphere like a rock across a pond, a concept then known as "dynamic soaring." Then some wag decided to shorten the term to "DynaSoar"-perhaps forgetting the fate that awaited the craft's prehistoric namesakes!...Then a proposal was developed that would have seen three stages in development-DynaSoar I, II, III, and finally the operational DynaSoar Manned Orbital Weapons System." The X-planes seem certainly direct ancestors of present X-37 Orbital Test Vehcile, history implies a weapons program and reason for strong protests from Russia and India concerning X-37 mission.


George Dyson, science historian, reviews Project Orion in a TED talk below. Freeman Dyson, George's father, worked on project to build 4,000 ton nuclear powered spaceship to travel to Saturn.

Voyager 1: Break On Through To The Other Side

Voyager 1 is poised to break on through to the other side - into interstellar space.  An amazing achieve- ment, Voyager 1 has traveled 11 billion miles in nearly 35 years to exit solar system. Ed Stone, a Cal Tech Voyager project scientist, said, "'the latest data indicate that we are clearly in a new region where things are changing more quickly. It is very exciting. We are approaching the solar system’s frontier...From January 2009 to January 2012, there had been a gradual increase of about 25 percent in the amount of galactic cosmic rays Voyager was encountering... Beginning on May 7, the cosmic ray hits have increased five percent in a week and nine percent in a month,'" reported via Universe Today. Data transmitted by the satellite traveling at 35,000 mph, takes presently about 16.5 hours to reach Earth. "The second important measure from the spacecraft’s two telescopes is the intensity of energetic particles generated inside the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself. While there has been a slow decline in the measurements of these energetic particles, they have not dropped off precipitously, which could be expected when Voyager breaks through the solar boundary," adds article. The present writer suspects they don't make them like Voyager, anymore--hats off!

Shenzhou-9 Spacecraft June 16 Launch Successful

Shenzhou-9 spacecraft taking aloft two men and China's first woman astronaut, blasted off June 16 from Gobi Desert for a two week mission to dock with Tiangong-1 Space Lab. It's an impressive feat with Chinese Long March 2F rocket bearing resemblance to Russian Proton rocket! You wonder how much leaked American tech also aided China in getting to where they are today?

mystery hexagon of saturn

In 1979, as Voyager 1 passed by Saturn, the satellite returned pictures of a hexagon on Saturn's North Pole.  The Cassini spacecraft confirmed, in 2006, the hexagon is still there! A brief You Tube video, "The Mystery Hexagon of Saturn" provides a fascinating look in less than two minutes. Discovery News provides a brief article and video, "Saturn's North Pole Hexagon Mystery Solved?", where a hexagon is achieved in laboratory conditions, supporting the notion this is indeed a natural phenomenon.