Episode list

Primal Space

NASA's Baffling Engine Problem
Large rocket engines are prone to combustion instability where fuel does not burn evenly in the engine. This problem resulted in engine explosions in Rocketdyne's F1 engine for the Saturn V rocket until resolved with an ingenious solution.
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The Largest Rocket Never Launched
Sea Dragon was a concept for a reusable rocket so large it could not be transported by land and had to be launched at sea. Alas, it never materialized as NASA already had the working, though much smaller, Saturn V and was facing drastic budget cuts.
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The Mysterious 30 Year Journey of Apollo 12
With our sights set on travel to the moon lunar space junk has been an issue since the 1970s. So NASA tries to push unneeded objects into a higher solar orbit to avoid future collisions. That didn't quite work out with the Saturn V third stage of Apollo 12 which went into an orbit that returned to Earth over thirty years later. As of now (2023) it's off on another long trip around the sun but it will visit home from time to time.
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The Self Balancing Monorail
In 1910 Louis Brennan built a prototype monorail train that, through some really clever engineering, miraculously balanced on a single group of inline wheels.
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