Hi 22C° Low 5C° | 
The Wheel Deal
10 hours, 38 minutes ago
Pendock Uncorked
15 hours, 28 minutes ago
GabiVille
5 days, 15 hours ago
The Wanderer
1 week agoView all Times LIVE Blogs
Endeavour lifts off for the last time PICTURE: Reuters
Nearly half a million people rocked-up to wave goodbye to space shuttle Endeavour as she blasted off the launch pad at Cape Canaveral on her last mission. Read More…
Fifty years ago today, the Russians sent the first human into earth orbit. Read More…
It’s 25 years today since the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up just 73 seconds after launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 28, 1986. Read More…
Two more launches and the Space Shuttle programme with its clunky space gliders is finished. Read More…
Forty years ago today, while en-route to the Moon and 321 860km from the safety of Earth, the Apollo 13 Command Module blew a hole in its external oxygen tanks and began venting precious O2 into the sucking maw of space. Read More…
The astronauts of Apollo 8 may hold the record for celebrating the most remote Christmas ever as their capsule orbited the moon on December 24, 1968. Read More…
At 7.31am on Friday, a large empty rocket hull the size of an SUV and travelling at 9 000km/h smacked into the moon’s surface in what will go down in history as one of the oddest and most expensive ways to go divining for water.
The impact, in a crater called Cabeus at the south pole, was supposed to kick up a 10km-high plume of debris. Four minutes later, a following probe, the Opel Corsa-sized Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS for short, followed the rocket through the cloud of dust and rubble, taking a flurry of pictures before smashing into the smoking hole left by its predecessor. Read More…
A Saturn V blasts off. SOURCE: NASA
Lock up your daughters! Hide the animals! Get the shotguns – here comes a rocket!
The launch of the Saturn V that took the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon must have been a spectacular sight.
The astronauts rode into space in a tiny capsule atop a 110m-high three-stage rocket packed with explosive fuel, the first stage punching them into space at an initial velocity of 9 920 km/h and burning 2 000 000 kilograms of propellant in the first 68km of flight.
Too bad we’ll never see that again, although a multiple rocket launch at the start of a world-changing ballistic missile attack would be pretty gripping to watch, if only for a short time.
However, I am told that the Space Shuttle launches are pretty damn fiery and earth-shaking and you CAN go and see them down at the Kennedy Space Center in balmy, happy Florida, USA.
Since the Space Shuttle is also an endangered animal – there are to be another seven Space Shuttle launches before the vehicles are retired – if you want to see one, go now.
There are a couple ways to see a launch. You can head off on your own to one of the recommended off-site viewing spots, or you can watch it on site at the Kennedy Space Center. A good option is to sign-up for a tour with an operator.
For a calendar of scheduled Space Shuttle and other rocket launches, click here.
Then go and chase some rockets.
