Covering All Things Florida
When some of us in the media were first introduced to Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander named Odysseus, we were a bit puzzled. Why was the Columbia Sportswear logo prominently displayed on the gold-foiled exterior?
With only one day to go before the launch of Crew 8, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson led a press briefing on Wednesday morning February 28, 2024, at Kennedy Space Center. The 8th Commercial Crew trip to the International Space Station (ISS) remains on schedule for a launch just after midnight (12:04 am EST) early Friday morning March 1.
On February 22, 2024, the Intuitive Machines (IM) spacecraft named Odysseus became the first American craft to successfully make a soft moon landing since the final Apollo mission in 1972. Odysseus came to rest near the South Polar region where it is hoped that ice and therefore water will be found.
Most Americans are able to recall that the United States successfully landed astronauts on the Moon during 1969 and into the early 1970s. What’s not as well known is the number of attempts by various nations to explore the Moon, whether by fly-by or actual landing…..and how many were unsuccessful.
NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are standing down from the Tuesday, Feb. 6, undocking opportunity of Axiom Mission 3 from the International Space Station. Mission teams will continue to review weather conditions off the coast of Florida, which currently are not favorable for return, and set a new target opportunity for space station departure and splashdown of the Dragon spacecraft and Axiom crew members. The newest target date for undocking is Wednesday at 9:05 AM ET . The splashdown time has not yet been announced.
There is no indication that these delays in any way pose risk to the crew of either the Dragon spacecraft or the ISS.
Italy is well-known to world travelers for its culinary expertise, and that skill is now being added to the country’s many contributions to space exploration on the Axiom 3 mission.
In an NG-20 pre-launch media teleconference on January, 26, 2024, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX VP Build and Flight Reliability, revealed that a new access door had been added to the fairing that protects the Cygnus spacecraft atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. But Why?
Do you remember family road trips of years gone by? A designated navigator would sit in the front passenger seat with a map and a highlighter, or with a AAA TripTik, telling the driver what turn to take next.
In the factual 1995 feature film Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell, one of the other two Apollo 13 astronauts, Fred Haise played by Bill Paxton, gets quite ill during the flight back from the moon.
It’s been a quarter of a century since commercial passengers could fly to American destinations at beyond the speed of sound. That was on the iconic Concorde, a joint French and English venture initiated in 1954 with first commercial flight in 1976.
