Month: July 2019

It took 150 years for Florida’s ex-felons to win back their right to vote – and a single swish of the Republican governor’s pen last month to seemingly snatch it away again. Now supporters of Amendment 4, which ended the civil war-era disenfranchisement of released criminals by attracting a two-thirds majority in a public ballot…

  Nasa’s Apollo XI mission that sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land on the moon, and Michael Collins to orbit it, was part of a nine-year programme that employed 400,000 men and women around the United States. We spoke to some of the workers who made humankind’s first steps on the lunar surface possible — and…

Fifty years after the first lunar landing, Nasa is accelerating plans to return humans to the moon — aided by some of the workers and hardware that helped to secure Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind”. The US government space agency is transforming Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its gateway to the stars since 1962, for…

Seated at her console in the firing room at Kennedy Space Centre, JoAnn Morgan felt the building shudder and the windows rattle as the Saturn V rocket shooting the Apollo XI crew to the moon thundered into the sky 50 years ago tomorrow. Yet a photograph snapped shortly after became iconic not only for the…

As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the moon, a speech on file in the White House was ready for a potentially darker side of the lunar landing. It addressed a fear shared by all the crew — especially Michael Collins, left to orbit above as his crewmates made history below. For…

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Margrit von Braun’s father when he came home from work in the evenings, set his briefcase to one side and asked how her day had been. At least, not to her. A loving and attentive parent, he would sit for dinner at their home in Huntsville, Alabama,…

Apollo 11: Buzz Aldrin’s young son worried about dad tripping on the moon Children of astronauts of Apollo landings reveal how they saw their parents work as just another mission     There was one thing going through Andy Aldrin’s mind as his father descended the ladder of the lunar landing module to take his…

Seismic activity has been detected and recorded for the first time by instruments from Nasa’s InSight spacecraft stationed on the surface of Mars. The detection of the rumbling from the Martian interior, which was picked up by seismic sensors designed and built by British teams at Imperial College London and Oxford University, was hailed by…

Dragon capsule explodes America’s human space programme suffered a setback when a new capsule designed to carry astronauts was destroyed in an explosion during a test of its crew safety system. Beachgoers saw a cloud of orange-brown smoke billow across Cape Canaveral air force station on Florida’s Atlantic coast, where SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule had…

China plans to build a research station on the moon in about ten years, its senior space official has said. In a speech marking China’s Space Day, Zhang Kejian, head of China National Space Administration (CNSA), disclosed the timetable for a vision set out last year of a base in the south pole region “shared…