Category Archives: Space Travel

The Hubble’s Cooler Younger Sibling

Somewhat of an actual time machine, the telescope is probably the most well-known instrument of the field of astronomy. While the object itself is not a foreign concept, knowledge about specific telescopes is less common. In fact, aside from the Hubble, I probably could not have named one before this semester. Much to my surprise, […] Continue reading

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Death by Black Hole

Unfortunately, astronomers and physicists are pretty sure you can’t just go through a black hole and pop out the other side – you will, in fact, die. The real question is, how exactly will you die? Continue reading

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Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into flight, killing all seven of its crew … More Continue reading

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EmDrive

One of the greatest difficulties interstellar, or even just interplanetary, travel faces today is the problem of fuel storage. In order to accelerate to fast enough speeds to travel between planets in a reasonable amount of time, as well as to later decelerate, ships would need to hold a tremendous amount of fuel, which would […] Continue reading

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EmDrive

One of the greatest difficulties interstellar, or even just interplanetary, travel faces today is the problem of fuel storage. In order to accelerate to fast enough speeds to travel between planets in a reasonable amount of time, as well as to later decelerate, ships would need to hold a tremendous amount of fuel, which would […] Continue reading

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EmDrive

One of the greatest difficulties interstellar, or even just interplanetary, travel faces today is the problem of fuel storage. In order to accelerate to fast enough speeds to travel between planets in a reasonable amount of time, as well as to later decelerate, ships would need to hold a tremendous amount of fuel, which would […] Continue reading

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Vanderbilt Aerospace

On the weekend of April 15th, the Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Lab (VADL) traveled to Huntsville, Alabama to compete in NASA’s Student Launch Initiative.  We competed against 40 other colleges and universities.  While in Huntsville, we participated in a rocket fair where we had the opportunity to showcase our rocket as well as learn about rockets […] Continue reading

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The Future of Humans on Mars

Humans inhabiting Mars has been a much debated topic amongst engineers, astronomers, and scientists for decades. Stories of manned missions to Mars can be found in film, books, and other forms of popular culture. The notion of colonizing Mars is often accompanied by the imminent doom of our home planet. However, in order for a […] Continue reading

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Bootstrapping Space Industry

In 2012, Philip Metzger and some of his colleagues from the Kennedy Space Center worked on a paper theorizing how we could “bootstrap” our way across the Solar System. The first step of their plan was to get materials to the Moon’s surface. From there, development of the industry would continue as the field of robotics has… Continue reading

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Propulsion Methods for Space Travel

One of the biggest problems that we have when it comes to interstellar travel is that we don’t have a spaceship that can go fast enough to get us where we want to go in a reasonable time. Luckily, we have some really smart scientists trying to come up with ways to make a really […] Continue reading

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