Browsing: miles

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

Voyager 1 is currently drifting through interstellar space at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, more than 15 billion miles from…

In 1985, a 14-year-old in Britain could legally drive a Sinclair C5 down a dual carriageway at 15 miles per hour with lorries thundering past at chest height, because the Department of Transport had quietly classified the battery trike as an electrically assisted pedal cycle rather than a motor vehicle.

Saving Tips May 29, 2026

Sir Clive Sinclair launched the C5 at Alexandra Palace on 10 January 1985, promising a £399 electric machine that could…

In 1962, the US detonated a 1.4 megaton nuclear bomb 250 miles above the Pacific in a test called Starfish Prime, and the electromagnetic pulse knocked out streetlights, burglar alarms, and a telephone company microwave link in Honolulu nearly 900 miles away, on an island most engineers had assumed was safely out of range

Saving Tips May 28, 2026

On July 9, 1962, a Thor rocket carrying a W49 thermonuclear warhead detonated roughly 250 miles above Johnston Atoll in…

On 15 September 2017, NASA engineers deliberately steered the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn’s atmosphere at 70,000 miles per hour, not because the mission had failed but because they were terrified of where it might fall if they left it in orbit.

Saving Tips May 27, 2026

On 15 September 2017, Cassini stopped talking. The spacecraft had spent its final minutes plunging into Saturn’s upper atmosphere at…