The Space Guy

26/04/2025

With the Hubble Space Telescope celebrating 35 years since it's launch, this week, here is my exclusive interview from 1993 with NASA astronaut, Jeff Hoffman.
Jeff did three spacewalks with Story Musgrave on the first servicing mission to the telescope and this interview was conducted a few months after that mission when he returned to visit Leicester University in the UK.
At the time I was an Astrophysics student so was keenly interested in that event. For this interview, I operated one of the cameras and did the entire edit of the piece. The programme our team used to produce was broadcast on a local community TV channel, but otherwise not widely circulated.
Video quality seems poor by today's standards, but all out filming and editing was done on analogue SVHS tapes. That how it was, in the 1990s!
Hope you enjoy.

26/06/2022

https://www.facebook.com/123621931040548/posts/5242216795847677/

NASA says the next realistic launch period for the Artemis 1 moon mission opens Aug. 23 and extends until Sept. 6. Here are the launch times for this period.

The next series of Artemis 1 launch dates begin Sept. 19. Officials are expected to announce a target launch date in the coming weeks.

Read more: https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/06/24/nasa-targeting-late-summer-launch-for-first-artemis-moon-rocket/

21/03/2022

"Invincible" by Eddie Vedder, featuring NASA's Ar…:

Grammy-award winning artist Eddie Vedder's "Invincible" video collaboration with NASA is inspired by our Artemis I Moon mission. The Space Launch System rock...

29/10/2021

Just like Apollo before it, later Artemis missions will use rovers to explore greater distances from the landing zones.
So this is good news that the VIPER rover is taking shape, even if only in prototype form at this stage.

All the brightly colored plastic pieces might remind you more of something you'd find in a kids' playroom than in a NASA clean room, but the team that built a full-scale replica of an early design of NASA's Artemis water-hunting mobile Moon robot had some serious fun—while eliminating serious risk...

28/10/2021

Wow, NASA has some exciting plans for a new 100-year mission to explore the edge of our solar sysyem and beyond. A worthy successor to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

It would travel faster and farther than any man-made object we've made thus far.

15/09/2021

https://blogs.nasa.gov/nelson/2021/09/14/ramping-up-humanitys-return-to-the-moon/

Ramping Up Humanity’s Return to the Moon Hello, everyone! I’m excited to launch this blog to keep you informed of all the incredible things we’re working on at NASA, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic where virtual has become many of our new normal. Safety of the NASA workforce ha...

03/09/2021

Japan's space agency, JAXA, has completed a successful test of a completely new kind of rocket engine. It will be interesting if they can make it work more practically.

Liquid-fuelled rocket engine design has largely followed a simple template since the development of the German V-2 rocket in the middle of World War 2. Propellant and oxidizer are mixed in a combus…

18/08/2021

The journey to return to The Moon is picking up pace and I cannot wait for the first rockets to launch.
The rocket for Artemis I is currently undergoing testing in Florida and likely to launch in early 2022.
Meanwhile, the first piece of hardware for the second rocket has just arrived at the Cape.

The Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage for the second flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket arrived in Florida on July 28 for the final phase of production. The stage and its single RL10 engine provide the in-space propulsion needed to send NASA’s Orion spacecraft and its crew on a p...

18/08/2021

30 Years ago, my own home computer of choice was the Commodore Amiga (I had three in total). They had custom microchips and a highly capable operating system that was the best available in a desktop package at the time.
I didn't know it at the time, and discovered later, that Nasa also recognised tje Amiga's special capabilities amd used these computers for mission critical operations. Nice one!

In 1986, a group of NASA engineers faced a difficult choice in solving their data processing woes: continue tolerating the poor performance of PC architecture, or pony up the cash for exotic workst…

11/07/2021

I wish Richard Branson every success today in his Virgin Galactic flight into Space!
Richard truly is a dare devil of our time. Previously, he was the first to circumnavigate the globe in a non-stop hot air balloon flight, and in the 1980's he crossed the Atlantic (twice) in speedboats to obtain the World Record for the fastest crossing of that ocean. In fact, the second of those boats was built in my home town, Lowestoft, at a shipyard that I even worked at briefly, albeit a couple of years after that crossing.

Join us July 11th for our first fully crewed rocket powered test flight, and the beginning of a new space age. Aboard will be our team of two pilots...

06/07/2021

https://www.space.com/nasa-changing-astronaut-radiation-exposure-limit

The proposed guideline would give all astronauts the same radiation limit, regardless of age and s*x.

15/06/2021

The first rocket capable of taking humans to The Moon was recently assembled and here is some time-lapse footage of that sequence. It makes you realise just how big the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is, that even a tall core stage can be lifted so high up!

The Space Launch System rocket core stage for the first Artemis mission was lifted and stacked in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. The ...