NASA Image of the Day (March 16, 2026)
Celebrating 100 Years Since Goddard’s Breakthrough Moment in Modern Rocketry
Dr. Robert H. Goddard and a liquid oxygen-gasoline rocket in the frame from which it was fired on March 16, 1926, at Auburn, Mass.
Image Credit: Esther Goddard, from the Clark University archive
I just learned that today is the 100th anniversary of the first liquid fueled rocket launch! Robert Goddard who is the preeminent pioneer of modern rocketry was inspired by the science fiction he read. As I’m a life long sci fi nerd I just love this.
One of the kiddos is in 4-H, and one of the projects she joined this year was rocketry. They spent the last few monthly meetings building their tiny 12-inch cardboard rockets. Yesterday was launch day. We drove hours to some place in the Central Valley where it was legally permitted for the public to launch rockets. Apparently it’s a popular hobby.
Some of the rockets people brought were more than six feet tall, some equipped with devices that track their altitude and descent. One of the rockets reached an altitude of 6,200 feet. Most did not go that high.
It wasn’t lost on me that these things looked like missiles; albeit with plastic warheads. Probably not the place to be if you’ve fought in a war or have suffered through it and have PTSD.
Occasionally the parachutes would fail to deploy and the rockets would take a parabolic path straight into the ground. Or a rocket would explode midair and fall apart, scattering debris. Or the rocket would go off course and head toward where everyone was standing. The launch coordinator often yelled over the P.A. system for people to watch out.
They even had a “piñata rocket” loaded with candy so that when the parachutes deployed, it also dropped candy, and the kids would run around the debris field to gather it.
Surreal, considering the state of the world.
The science, the physics, the spectacle… it was fun. Tinged with a little sadness at the realization that the same science and physics are also used for war. Science is cool until it isn’t. Like splitting an atom.
After a week of work we finally finished our first model rocket airframe, its fully bio based: natural fibres, bio epoxy, the whole thing. Im verg proud of it haha, designed it myself.
You ever think of how one of the pioneers of modern rocketry was also a wizard trained by Aliester Crowley?
Which, I feel like if there was one guy who woulda been capable of casting Magic Missile in real life, that would have been him.
Have we had this one before? I don’t know, but some things are worth repeating.
Or if you’d like a more sustainable option for your real tree that has reached the point no return, in the UK people are using donated trees to bolster natural sea defences:
Santa Visits Artemis II Rocket - NASA
Space Santa travels the world, giving presents to all the good rockets and craft.
Steffen Kern (German, b. 1988, Munich, Germany) - Room and Rocket, 2025, Drawings: Black Pastel and Color Pencil on Cardboard
IN-SPACe Model Rocketry & CANSAT Student Competition Launches in Kushinagar - TimesTech
The national finale of the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) & ISRO - Indian Space Research Organization / Astronautical Society of India (ASI) Model Rocketry & CANSAT India Student Competition 2024-25 is set to launch in Kushinagar from October 27-30, with 600+ students across 71 teams vying to design, build and launch model rockets that deploy mini-satellites at 1 km altitude.
it is lowkey kinda funny and annoying how the rocket equation even haunts climbing once you get into multipitch
I wanna send => this is a hard climb for me => I need more gear to be safe => this slows me down => I need more gear to cope with how long im climbing => this is a hard climb for me etc.
and also
I can climb a little more confidently/faster => I need less gear for protection and food & water => I can climb more confidently/faster etc.
Explore how Europe is racing against time to develop reusable rocket technology and challenge the dominance of SpaceX, according to ESA’s director.
A recent rocket launch – Europe aims for reusability to compete.
The Urgency of Reusable Rocket Development
Europe’s space ambitions are facing a critical challenge: the need for reusable rocket systems. Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the…
As absolutely everyone expected, building a rocket with multiple stages that need to fire in sequence is hard. Literally rocket science. But I thought the complications were pretty neat. There are two different ways to try to get around some of these complications, one predominantly used by the American space program, and one mostly by the Soviet.
First off, even in the Space Age, Newton is hanging around with his pesky first law: Things that are moving will stay moving, unless acted on by an outside force. In a vacuum, outside forces are in short supply, so a rocket had better have brought its own force.
In the case of rocket staging, this applies when you want to separate a lower rocket stage from the upper. If you just cut the engines and separate the two, the lower half will just keep following along. You’ve got to give it a kick to get it to a safe enough distance to start up the motors on the upper stage.
So one of the ‘hidden’ features on the Saturn V is a series of retrorockets. They’re angled upwards on the various stages, and they fire to push a dropped stage down and away. Some are so well-hidden you probably won’t see them in a museum. In fact, it was hard to even find a real photo of them instead of a diagram.
(I was very happy to find a Saturn V model I have includes these rockets)
At the very bottom of the Saturn V, the S-IC stage are conical fairings around the engines. Hidden beneath these are eight solid-propellant rockets that will fire when the S-IC is dropped. There’s no port for them to fire through: They literally blast through the skin of the fairing. It goes into the atmosphere anyways, it won’t need aerodynamics where it’s going.
The next hard part of staging is related. Most main rocket motors use liquids for fuel like hydrogen and oxygen. Those two quite like to be in gaseous form when pressure and temperature allow, and the engines won’t work when fed a gas. On the ground, it’s easy enough: Liquids are more dense, so they’ll be at the bottom of the tank where the pickups are.
But in zero/microgravity, there’s nothing telling the liquid where to be. Acceleration could do the trick in pushing it backward, but oh no, you just dumped your source of acceleration behind you, and you couldn’t start up the next motor until it was dropped. You’re just coasting right now and no acceleration is pushing the liquid down.
Meet the ullage motor. These look like little downward-facing rockets around the outside of a stage. After stage separation, they’ll fire to provide the kick to push the liquid fuel to the bottom of the tanks so the next stage can start successfully.
Anyways, that’s how the American space program preferred to do it. It’s complex and adds a lot of plumbing and electrical wiring to get this stuff to work. But how about the Soviet space program? They had a pretty clever (or un-clever) way to solve both problems at once. (This method also got used by American rockets like the Titan II)
Just light the upper stage while the lower stage is still attached and firing! That’s the reason for the latticework holding stages together instead of a solid interstage. The lower stage is providing the acceleration to start the upper, and then when it cuts off, you dump it and your upper stage propels you away from the lower. You do get an exhaust plume going straight onto the lower stage that has to go out those gaps.
Oh, and sometimes the stages don’t separate when you have that rocket firing. It happened on Soyuz 18a in 1975, going to the Salyut 4 space station. The lower stage didn’t detach and the entire rocket spun wildly out of control. The capsule at the top of the rocket managed to detach and make back to Earth, putting the cosmonauts through 21.3 g loading. They were so far off course they thought they might have landed in foreign territory, so they burned their documents and experimental data.
A significant development in European space technology has emerged as Avio, the Italian rocket manufacturer, secured a €40 million contract from the European Space Agency (ESA). This pivotal agreement focuses on designing a reusable rocket upper-stage demonstrator, marking a crucial step towards more cost-effective and sustainable access to space. The prospect of reusable rocket technology is…
Brazil’s MLBR Project: A Leap Towards Independent Satellite Launches
Space enthusiasts, rejoice! Exciting news has emerged regarding the MLBR project – a significant undertaking for Brazil’s space program. Recently, the company behind this initiative shared details about its launch platform, marking a crucial step towards greater independence in accessing orbit and supporting both domestic and…
