Spaceflight

63 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 2 of 2.

61. Apollo 13's crew got home using a lunar lander as a lifeboat.Two days into the flight to the Moon in April 1970, an oxygen tank exploded and crippled Apollo 13's main spacecraft. The three astronauts retreated into their small lunar lander,…
62. Nobody can agree where space actually begins.The usual answer is 100 kilometres up, a boundary called the Kármán line. But the atmosphere does not stop anywhere, the US uses 80 kilometres to award astronaut wings, and there …
63. Space junk could trigger a chain reaction that closes off orbits for generations.In 1978 NASA scientist Donald Kessler warned that if enough debris built up in low Earth orbit, collisions would create more debris, causing more collisions, in a runaway cascade.…

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