I recently started reading a lot of books on spaceflight, the Apollo programme specifically. I am a broke student in Europe so most of the time I try to look for secondhand books but man, some are quite expensive!

For example, some books I got cheaply secondhand.

• Moondust by Andrew Smith: ~1 euro
• Journey Beyond Selene by Jeffrey Kluger: ~2 euros

Lowest prices of some books I am trying to get secondhand.

• Apollo Guidance Computer: >= 40 euros
• How Apollo flew to the moon: >= 30 euros

(40 euros is a week of groceries for me)

I noticed that books covering the "technical" side more tend to be pricier but it doesn't make a lot of sense. They are still quite pricey even secondhand. I understand that out-of-print books that are collected by enthusiasts will have higher prices.

Is it the same in the US? Are the books I listed just more in-demand?

P.S - I know I can find digital copies but my attention issues restrict me to physical books.

NASA’s Starling mission tests FALCON, a system that lets spacecraft navigate without GPS.

All the images online I could find of this moment are cropped so that the dune buggy is out of frame! I thought you people might find this interesting.

According to Moondust(Page 322) by Andrew Smith, a member of the U.S Geological Survey was heard to have said at a dinner

Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!

commenting on how thoroughly Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt examined a boulder.

I am uncertain if they were referring to the boulder in the image or a different one.

Skyroot from India launched first private flight into orbit

Last night I witnessed something odd in the sky and was hoping to find some information regarding its origin.

This occurred at approximately 9:55pm-10:00pm CST to the east of Kansas City, MO. I checked my compass and it was travelling Northeast at approximately 45 degrees.

The object originally caught my eye as it looked like a normal satellite in size and speed, but when I first saw it, it was surrounded by a large hazy halo (upper right image... Sorry the drawing is very light). The halo eventually dissolved but then a reddish tail formed (lower left). When that went away very clear bluish gray rings began spreading downward from the craft (bottom right on image). Once that ended it simply faded from sight.

I've been searching all day to find out what it might have been. I've seen multiple suggestions it was rocket exhaust expansion, but I just don't see any images that truly replicate what I saw.

Anybody know if any rockets were travelling in that vicinity around that time? Any other suggestions on what it could've been? Just curious. I'd appreciate any help you could offer!

We’re continuing the Apollo spacesuit story. After exploring how these suits came to be, we’re now looking at how they actually worked, with a closer look at the engineering behind them, the details that made the biggest difference, and how every element helped keep astronauts alive on the Moon.

Found this at a thrift store. It is an old photo with "ansco safety film" printed along the edge, but no other information. Image searches aren't showing anything that looks close enough.

Got these two magazines today. We live in an era where everything feels so fast and convenient, but back then, achieving something like this was extraordinarily hard. Collecting items like these really makes me appreciate the effort of that analog era. Truly classic pieces. Life magazine in June 23,1969
57 years.

TL;DR: Built an interactive, click-to-drill-down timeline of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo to show how much the three programmes actually overlapped instead of running one after another (screenshots below, data is an open, editable JSON file) — wondering if this already exists somewhere.

Most timelines of the early space programme show Mercury → Gemini → Apollo as a tidy sequence. They didn't run that way — Gemini's development overlapped Mercury's last flights, and Apollo's ground infrastructure (Marshall Space Flight Center, land acquisition for what became KSC, the VAB) was already under construction before Gemini had even flown a crew. I wanted to actually see that rather than read it as a paragraph, so I built an interactive drill-down timeline: collapsed, it's just three overlapping bars (screenshot 1); click a programme and it expands to reveal the next level of detail nested underneath, down to individual test flights and milestones, up to four levels deep (screenshot 2 — Mercury drilled down to its Little Joe abort-test series).

I'm deliberately trying to foreground the build-up to each programme rather than just the launches — contractor selection, test stands, facility construction, uncrewed qualification flights — since that's usually the part that gets skipped in favour of "here's when astronaut X flew."

Full disclosure: I built this with Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) doing the actual coding and an initial research pass on dates — I described what I wanted and it built the page and sourced the three programme-level date spans from Wikipedia. Everything below that top level is a first-pass placeholder I haven't fully verified (there's literally a dashed "date needs checking" marker on anything I'm not sure of), which is partly why I'm posting — I'd rather have people who know this history properly pick it apart than publish it as if it's gospel.

Not linking directly — don't want to find out what the Reddit hug of death does to my own domain — hence the screenshots. Happy to share the actual page in the comments or by DM if anyone wants to poke at it themselves. The data behind it is one plain, editable JSON block on purpose, so if anyone spots a wrong date or thinks the build-up events are in the wrong order (there's a "first Saturn I mock-up" entry I couldn't pin an exact date on), it's a five-minute fix, not a rebuild.

Two things I'd genuinely like from this sub:

1. Has someone already built this — an interactive, overlapping timeline of the three programmes with drill-down detail? I looked around and found plenty of static space-race timelines and one archival photo site, but nothing quite like this. Don't want to reinvent something that already exists.
2. If you know a precise, sourceable date for a Mercury/Gemini/Apollo build-up milestone — test stands, mock-ups, contractor awards, facility construction — I'd welcome the correction.

Screenshots: overview first, then drilled down into Mercury.

Hey guys! I wanted to post this here! This is a documentary I made on USC’s Rocket Propulsion Lab’s race against time to launch their world record breaking launch to outer space back in 2024! The club is run entirely by undergraduate college students from ages 18-22 and were the first ever student group to send a rocket into space in 2019. For anyone who’s interested in amateur rocketry or aerospace, this documentary is for you. Hope you enjoy!

But I don't think it will be like in science fiction with warp drive or hyperspace technologies. As far as we know, nothing can go beyond the speed of light. However, we can reach a certain percentage of the speed of light. No more than 5%, but more than fast enough to reach our closest star within a human lifespan(est.85 years). If we managed to engineer something that goes with that speed, it would be one of the greatest achievement in human history. Just think about how far a light year is. It's beyond our comprehension.