The NASA Saturn V Owners’ Workshop Manual is a comprehensive guide to the world’s most famous rocket, best known for its role in sending the Apollo missions, including Apollo 11, to the Moon. Each Saturn V launch cost $185 million in 1960s dollars, that’s over $1.1 billion today, the rocket had a payload to LEO of…
The LeviMoon holds the distinction of being the world’s first levitating moon lamp, it was developed by the team at Coocepts to realistically portray the lunar surface – though as this desk-based moon isn’t locked in a tidal orbit like the real Moon, you can see the whole 360 degree surface as it rotates. Each…
The Voyager Golden Record LP Box Set was developed as an Earth-bound companion for the famous golden records contained within both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes launched in 1977. As of 2018, Voyager 1 is now the most distant man-made object from the Earth – over 21,000,000,000 kilometres away and continuing to…
These NASA Space Tourism Posters were developed by a creative team of visual strategists inside JPL known as “The Studio”. Altogether there are 9 artists, designers, and illustrators, and they worked alongside Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech scientists and engineers on each design. The poster series started out as a project within the JPL to celebrate the…
The Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1 on October the 5th, 1957 and in so doing kicked the Space Race into high gear – where it would remain for over a decade until the Americans landed Buzz and Neil on the Moon in 1969 and took the crown. This Sputnik-1 model was built in 1957 as a…
A Century In The Sky is a timeline of the history of Boeing, the American aerospace giant that’s turning 100 years old this year. The 20th century saw the invention of powered flight in 1903, and the next 97 years were characterised by the lightning fast development of aircraft – often further accelerated in times of war…
Hans Jenssen is a staggeringly talented artist who was contracted by the team behind Star Wars in 1997 to create a series of hand-drawn illustrations of the inner engineering of various Star Wars vehicles and scenes. The fact that Hans doesn’t use any software or other digital means to create his work seems almost antiquated…
Bulova and Omega were in a heated battle during the early years of the Space Race to become the official chronograph used in space and eventually worn on the surface of the Moon. As is well known, Omega won the battle and specially prepared Speedmasters were worn by all Apollo astronauts. What isn’t as widely…
Moonwalk One is a film that started production 18 months before the launch of Apollo 11, NASA wanted the mission recorded for posterity and so they hired Francis Thompson to head the project, who was widely considered to be the best documentary filmmaker in the USA at the time. In 1970 the population of the…
Michael Kagan is an artist with a unique style that tends to appeal to people who are otherwise not particularly interested in art, especially those with an interest in engineering, machines and flight. In order to see the images in Kagan’s paintings you typically have to stand a few feet back from the canvas, if…
This American flag was onboard Apollo 12 for the entirety of its mission to the Moon in November of 1969, it’s made of silk and has the signature of Alan L. Bean in the lower right corner – Bean was the Lunar Module Pilot for the mission, which also happened to be his first time…
The Apollo 13 Owners’ Workshop Manual is one of the most detailed and reader-friendly books about the Apollo 13 mission currently in print. It’s the work of David Baker – a veteran of the Apollo Space Program and a man who was actually in the room working with the other engineers on the consumables calculations…
