Carnival of Space Turns 100!

This week's Carnival of Space is hosted by One-Minute Astronomer, and it's a big one, number one-hundred! It's also a really cool one, with quite a lot of new information for me, starting with One-Minute Astronomer itself. It's an excellent observation-oriented and educational astronomy site.

Other special points of interest for me:

Mang's Bat Page has an introduction to interactive orbit simulators available through JPL's Small-Body Database Browser (I searched for Eros) and other online resources.

Beyond Apollo has a great post on Wernher von Braun's 1969 proposal for a nuclear-rocket Mars mission. Of course this never happened, but this post shows well how it might have been done.

And most amazing of all (partly because I knew nothing of the 2008 Orbiter add-on that is featured) is a post and video on The Discovery Enterprise blog of another Apollo-based Mars mission that never was, this one based on Stephen Baxter's alternate history SF novel Voyage. I loved that book, and I knew there had been an Orbiter add-on based on the book, but it was for an early version of Orbiter. This new add-on is called Baxter's Voyage Beta and was uploaded by "belisarius" in May 2008. The video by "rseferino" is really cool. He has some other Orbiter-based videos that also look interesting including one based on the amazing 2001: A Space Odyssey add-on (Floyd's Journey).