SEA LION PRESS

By Andy Cooke January 27th, 1967 : the first deaths of NASA astronauts on live operations. A day burned indelibly into the heart of NASA. The Space Race was well under way. Vostok had been answered by Mercury. Voskhod and Gemini were nearly simultaneous. Now, at last, the Americans were pulling ahead. The frenetic pace was coming to a crescendo, and the first Apollo mission was nearly ready to go. Changes, changes, changes A simulator that would receive a lemon hung on

By Andy Cooke Aleksandr Vishnevsky was the best surgeon on the staff of Dr Boris Petrovsy, the Minister of Health for the Soviet Union - himself a highly experienced surgeon. It was mid-afternoon on the 14th of January, 1966, and Vishnevsky had been unexpectedly rushed from a resort near the Kremlin clinic and into the operating room. In which lay a patient on whom the Minister himself had been operating. He took one look at the patient, lying opened up on the table, and gr

By Andy Cooke Eisenhower's Priorities After the furore over the Soviet Union "winning" the race to launch the first satellite, President Eisenhower was rather perplexed. The reaction seemed completely out of scale to his perception of its importance. However, the most important element had been established: The Freedom Of Space was now a recognised principle, which was crucial. The intelligence surveillance programme leapt into action, the Discoverer series of satellites so

By Andy Cooke This series will look at potential Points of Divergence (PoDs) of the Space Age. From the first launches to the present day, there are so many things that only went the way they did by the finest of margins and that could have resulted in a very different world - at least in the space arena, and often with more widespread implications. Today, we will go to the start. "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is

By Andy Cooke Spaceflight is hard. Manned spaceflight doubly so. To get to low Earth Orbit, you need to leave the atmosphere (this is actually the easy part) and accelerate to 17,000 miles per hour. Mach 25. Thirty times the speed of a 747. To do this, the only way that’s yet worked is to perch whatever-it-is you want to launch on top of a large rocket filled with extremely explosive substances and burn them in a (hopefully) controlled fashion. A rocket that, as the Apollo as