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When the movie Star Wars came out in 1977, remember how many jokes were made about Luke and Han blazing away at Imperial fighters with the ack-ack guns on the Millennium Falcon? In the July 1998 issue of Spaceflight (the popular publication of the British Interplanetary Society), there's an article1 about the military version of the Soviet Salyut space station, which flew as Salyuts 3 and 5 between 1974 and 1977. (The name “Salyut” was applied to two entirely different space station programs, one military and the other civilian, which used completely different hardware built by different design bureaux.2 The...

The Polyus military testbed was put together on a crash basis as an answer to America's Star Wars program. It was built around a surplus TKS manned spacecraft and was meant to test prototype ASAT and Star Wars defense systems. It failed to reach orbit, but it had succeeded, it would have been the core module of a new Mir-2 space station. Its mere presence could have decisively changed the shape of the Cold War in its final months. In 1985, it became clear that the Energia launch vehicle would be ready for launch before the Buran space shuttle that...

A researcher from The University of Western Ontario has helped solve a 37-year old space mystery using lunar images released yesterday by NASA and maps from his own atlas of the moon. Phil Stooke, a professor cross appointed to Western's Departments of Physics and Astronomy and Geography, published a major reference book on lunar exploration in 2007 entitled, "The International Atlas of Lunar Exploration." Yesterday, images and data from Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) were posted. The LRO, scheduled for a one year exploration mission about 31 miles above the lunar surface, will produce a comprehensive map, search for resources...