NewSpace companies are staffed by young, new leaders who worship the giants who got us here, such as the recently passed Neil Armstrong, and are eager to work with NASA to do great things together – but we have to both give them a chance and get out of the way.
I’m a major NASA nerd, so I’ve spent a lot of time learning about the space race and the Apollo missions.
I have had the privilege to be a member of many high-performance teams at NASA, both on and off the planet.
I grew up in this business… A lot of my life has been centered around this question about how NASA is helping us to understand our own home planet… and to understand our place in the universe.
I wound up getting offered a job at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I invented a power supply mechanism for the Galileo space craft which was in orbit around Jupiter until 2003.
A lot of missions for NASA or experiments on accelerators happen through a whole process of scientific retreats, long-range planning, forming collaborations to do studies – all this kind of stuff. It’s very democratic.
I was born the same week NASA was founded, so we’re the same age and feel some of the same pains, joys, and frustrations.
I did not think my chances were very big when I saw some of the other men who were competing for the team. They were a good group, and I had a lot of respect for them. But I decided to give it the old school try and to take some of NASA’s tests.
NASA should not be developing its own proprietary version of capabilities it could purchase commercially at much lower cost, especially when we know the agency’s bureaucratic tendencies will be to view the commercial versions as competitors to kill.
I like to think of ‘the studio’ as a laboratory where I can go in, learn tricks, apply, revise, and release. I’d figure I had about the same emotional attachment to my craft as a guy over at NASA does over… NASA stuff.
There’s no proof of the Earth’s curvature and this fake space agency Nasa use CGI images and every one is different.
All astronauts have degrees in science, engineering, or medicine, but other than that, there’s no one path to NASA. The one thing everyone has in common is we’ve all exceled in our chosen field.
I am humbled and excited by new opportunities for me to support and share the amazing work NASA is doing to help us travel farther into the solar system and work with the next generation of science and technology leaders.
I don’t think I could advocate for increasing NASA’s budget by a factor of two or ten, because I want us to have good roads in our country. I want us to have good education in our country. And NASA’s budget is part of a discretionary budget, and we can’t make that bigger without taking away other things.
If you compare NASA’s annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA’s budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.
Space in general gave us GPS – that’s not specifically NASA, but it’s investments in space.
There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
Sending greeting cards to aliens is hardly a new idea. In 2005, Craigslist solicited messages for broadcast to space by a transmitter in Florida, and in 2008, NASA beamed a Beatles song to the North Star (Polaris), on the assumption that any putative Polarians would appreciate the Fab Four’s 1960s-genre compositions.
I’m not going to take anyone else’s word for it, or NASA, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX. I’m going to build my own rocket right here and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on.
NASA asked me to create meals for the space shuttle. Thai chicken was the favorite. I flew in a fake space shuttle, but I have no desire to go into space after seeing the toilet.
Fifty years after humans landed on the moon for the first time, America has driven a golden spike on the trail to new space exploration feats through the work of our commercial partner SpaceX and all of the dedicated and talented flight controllers at NASA and our international partners.
This has been a really interesting journey, the seven years I’ve been at NASA, and it’s been a real exercise personally and professionally, but also spiritually.
Together, NASA and Hubble are opening new vistas on the universe.
I did not come to NASA to make history.
Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it’s not the same – it’s not even close to the same.
For years, I longed to hear Armstrong describe what it was like to contemplate Earth from 238,900 miles away. Former Space Center director George Abbey once told me that many NASA astronauts felt that looking at Earth was akin to a religious experience.
Boeing, LockMart, and hundreds of other companies, large and small, work in the space business, and they also create new techniques and technology; but they’d be nowhere if NASA and the Department of Defense hadn’t shown the way by funding the first big rockets and satellites.
I didn’t go into the NASA program to pick up rocks or to go the moon or anything else. I went in there because I was a military officer, and that was the next notch in my profession.
If you take all the money we’ve spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles.
NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve. It’s sad that we are turning the programme in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people.
Because Blue Peter can get you access to places – if you go to somewhere like Nasa, you don’t just see what most people see, you can get a lot of behind the scenes access. You can talk to an astronaut.
When I got to college, I discovered how many incredible opportunities NASA offered students pursuing a career in the space industry.
Data from orbiting telescopes like NASA’s Kepler Mission hint that the tally of habitable planets in our galaxy is many billion. If E.T.’s not out there, then Earth is more than merely special – it’s some sort of miracle.
I do a lot of work with NASA and am involved in research projects studying planetary evolution, Earth-like planets, and potential conditions for life elsewhere.
The costs of badly-run NASA projects are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA projects that didn’t go over budget. Hence the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished.
NASA trains you to assess emergency situations and react in a way to keep yourself and everyone else safe.
