A small hole found in the hull of a Russian Soyuz capsule docked with the International Space Station has been found to have been deliberately drilled, puzzling officials as to why anyone would damage a manned spacecraft in such a dangerous manner.
read more
President Donald J. Trump has announced that he has ordered the formation of a sixth branch of the U.S. military, adding the "Space Force" to the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marines, and Navy. Trump made the announcement at a meeting of the National Space Council on June 18, saying that "It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space." According to Trump, the Department of Defense and Pentagon would "immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces… We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the space force, separate but equal…"
read more
On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger launched with America’s first civilian to be sent into space, Christa McAuliffe. McAuliffe was chosen from a list of over 11,000 applicants for NASA’s Teacher in Space Project, aimed at sending civilian educators into orbit to later relate their experience as astronauts to their terrestrial students. Tragically, Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds into her ascent, killing all seven crewmembers, including McAuliffe.
read more
Professional treasure hunter Darrell Miklos is currently organizing a series of treasure hunts, searching for sunken Spanish ships that may have been carrying gold plundered from the Americas. Filming the expeditions for a docu-series that will be shown on the Discovery Channel, called Cooper’s Treasure, Miklos has a list of very promising candidate sites, provided by an unlikely source: a treasure map made by astronaut Gordon Cooper while he orbited the Earth in his Mercury capsule in 1963.
One of Cooper’s duties while piloting the Faith 7 capsule was to map out potential nuclear threats, but some of the magnetic anomalies that he detected were too faint to be from atomic sources, and were far from land in the Caribbean Sea.
read more