September 2023
From the Earth to Mars
... international author Jeffrey Manber retells the history of space exploration, from when the first visionaries realised the timeless dream of rocket travel in the early 1900s to the similarities of the space communities that erupted first in Russia...
February 2022
Revolution and responsibility: the challenges of space
... for our own humanity and our environment The second lesson that could be drawn from the history of space exploration concerns the apprehension of ‘the time to come’. I deliberately use this singular expression to introduce the distinction that...
March 2017
Rosetta – outstanding climax to pioneering mission
... tools and procedures, hiring and training the newcomers in the flight control team. Never before in the history of space exploration had a space probe reached a comet and tried to orbit around it. The flight dynamics and overall flight operations...
November 2020
Walking on the Moon
... a second rover from the former Soviet Union, followed in January 1973. Significantly, in terms of the history of space exploration, the Lunokhods remained the only teleoperated rovers to be sent to another planetary body until NASA’s Sojourner rover...
August 2016
Are the days of innovation in global space over - or just beginning?
... their liberal capitalist democracy. We must not underestimate contributions made to the arts and to our cultural history by space exploration and space travel While the USA and the Soviet Union fought for state-based supremacy both on land...
12 April 2021
60 years ago today, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space
Sixty years ago today cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, a flight that marked a new chapter in the history of space exploration. A trained steel worker turned military pilot, Gagarin was selected from thousands of candidates to...
