Cosmic Coffee Time with Andrew Prestage

Their planned 8 day visit to the International Space Station was turned on its head when NASA announced their Boeing Starliner capsule was unsafe to use. What did Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore do for those 9 months? And we check out the plan that was put together to get them home safely.

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After everything learned through Mercury and Gemini culminated in the seventeen Apollo missions. The first ten were all testing and rehearsals, but the whole program, and a whole era was characterised by Apollo 11, the first time humans set foot on the moon. Along with the triumph, there was tragedy and a very near miss, and one of the most underrated aspects of NASA's space program - the lunar roving vehicles that let the ast...

Nasa had accomplished spaceflight with Project Mercury but the gap to Apollo was still huge. How do you dock two spacecraft in flight and how do crews live in a tiny spacecraft for lunar length flights. These are just a couple of the questions that NASA needed to answer. Gemini was just the project to resolve all of these issues. It was a proving ground, for learning, testing and practicing the skills needed for lunar missions. Gem...

Back in the late 1950s, NASA was formed. Its first job was to put together a human crewed spaceflight program and put an astronaut into orbit - safely. This was Project Mercury. There were some uncrewed developmental flights and then six crewed flights between 1961 and 1963, this was an enormously significant step toward the Apollo moon landings just six years later.

So who were the Mercury astronauts and what was the mission profil...

Project Mercury was NASA’s first attempt at human crewed space flight. It sent Alan Shepard into space, and John Glenn into orbit, among four other landmark flights over 5 years. By 1963 it was done, and NASA was ready to launch Gemini, its next project. But being such a groundbreaking project, in 1964 NASA paid tribute to Mercury with a four metre high stainless steel monument with a time capsule that would remain sealed beneath i...

When Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit in 1961 to become the first human in space, he was already 14 years behind the first animals from Earth. The fruit flies that were flew to space in 1947 were just the first of many different animals in the decade and a half before Gagarin’s orbital flight that were used to test equipment and living things’ capacity to survive and work in weightlessness. There were primates, dogs, mice and rabbit...

Earth has a new moon! well, for about 8 weeks anyway. Asteroid 2024 PT5 has been captured by Earth’s gravity and will be in orbit until late November 2024. This is really unusual and there have only been a few confirmed mini moons in the past. Our new temporary neighbour is only about 11 metres across and won’t be visible to anyone who doesn’t have a professional large-scale telescope, but we’ll know it’s there! and although it wil...

Boeing’s Starliner space capsule blasted off for its first crewed test flight in early June. Great news right? Turns out, no. After arriving at the International Space Station, some technical problems meant that it couldn’t be used to take its crew of Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth. The two astronauts were left with no way to get home. 

The two capsules already docked at the space station couldn’t be used, so ...

NASA's Curiosity rover touched down on Mars in August 2012, and it's been exploring the Red Planet all that time. There have been some amazing discoveries and it's travelled over 30km but it has just made the most scientifically significant discovery of its 12 year career, and did it simply by running over a rock! One of Curiosity's wheels crushed a rock. It had looked just like any other orange martian rock, bu...

As I write this, just a couple of days have passed since the Chang'e 6 sample return capsule touched down with its historic payload. The first sample of rock and soil from the far side of the moon touched down on Earth. This has the potential to unlock some of the secrets from the side of the moon that we never see from Earth, why is the lunar crust thicker? Why are there fewer 'seas' on the far side? And what lies b...

In September 2023, Greg Brennecka stopped by to preview the return to Earth of the OSIRI-REx asteroid Bennu sample return capsule. The sample landed safely and the mission scientists like Greg Brennecka have started their analysis. Some of our toughest questions are being answered by the data already. How old is Bennu? Is there organic material? Where was the asteroid formed? Is Bennu different from what we expected?
But hasn&...

Titan. The largest moon in the Saturnian system has been a candidate as a habitable world ever since NASA’s Cassini mission sent back the first radar images of its surface in 2004. Astrobiologist Dr. Catherine Neish of Western University in Canada has spent years studying Titan, and has just published a study on the habitability of Titan. Catherine joins us to step through the findings, what is needed for life? Is there enough of i...

Space and cosmology throws up some strange effects sometimes, none stranger than spaghettification. Stephen Hawking coined the term for the stretching out that happens when you get close to a black hole. Let's take a look at what it really is, how it works, and if we should have anything to fear from spaghettification...

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Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines produced the first private mission to land on the moon. The Odysseus lander is just 300 km from the lunar south pole, investigating water ice and demonstrating the capabilities of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS).

But space is difficult and not many projects go perfectly first time. Is Odysseus ok? Let’s find out!

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So we pollute the upper atmosphere with rocket exhaust, is it worth the benefits of communications satellites and GPS? What about space junk? the garbage of earth orbit. Or mining asteroids? who owns the asteroids, can should they be able to sell the minerals asteroids provide?
These are questions that would never have been asked before space travel became as regular as it has today. Let's take a look at this new way of th...

Apollo 8 orbited the Moon in December 1968, seven months before the first moon landing. Even though Apollo 8 never landed on the Moon, it did produce one of the most iconic photographs of the Apollo program, the Earthrise photograph. Astronaut Bill Anders snapped a colour picture of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon as the capsule orbited the Moon.
But what makes this picture so iconic? And why did we nearly miss out on i...

In the news lately, you might have seen reports that the rings of Saturn are going to disappear from view. What could make that happen? And will they come back? Let’s check out what’s going on with the most spectacular feature in our solar system. 

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Photographing the night sky is a completely different technique to photographing almost anything else. There's hardly any light, the objects are tiny and they move! It's really difficult. We've all given it a go and been disappointed, but how do they get the incredible pictures we see on the internet and on TV, and how can normal spacefans like us take a night sky picture?

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India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover have landed in the south polar region of the moon. Some craters in this region are permanently shaded from the blazing sun and can have water ice at the base of these lunar craters. 

India became only the fourth nation to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon, and the first to successfully land a spacecraft in the moon’s south pole region. It’s an i...