Where in Space Do Your Taxes Go?
/Most of NASA's budget doesn't go toward NASA employees building equipment. It goes toward private contracts.
Read MoreMost of NASA's budget doesn't go toward NASA employees building equipment. It goes toward private contracts.
Read MoreOn December 14, 1972, Gene Cernan climbed into the lunar module from the surface of the Moon. He was the last person to be on the Moon. Today, more than 40 years later, the machines for landing people on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth no longer exist.
Read MoreAfter we landed on the Moon, few people suspected that we wouldn't keep going.
Read MoreApollo was more than a Moon mission. It was America's most successful technology mission. And our economy is still mining the benefits.
Read MoreSamuel P. Langley is remembered as the man who spent government money to build a airplane that never flew. The real story is a lot more interesting. In aerospace, failure actually is an option.
Read MoreThe Baltimore Sun published our op ed on space and the future. Go Gravity Well!
You can read it here.
The Hubble Telescope, with its eight-foot mirror and instruments measuring visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light, has punched above its considerable weight. Operating in low Earth orbit about 350 miles above the distorting atmosphere, Hubble has produced more data and photographs (not to mention images of gas clouds and star clusters that amount to art) than the telescope’s creators could have imagined. Scientists have used its observations to measure the universe’s rate of expansion.
Eventually, Hubble came to the end of its productive life, and its control systems began to fail. To fix the problems and extend the telescope’s lifespan would mean risking the lives of astronauts. The 2003 disaster with the Columbia Space Shuttle, in which all seven crew members died on re-entry, made us all the more cautious about the risk. We decided to shut Hubble down. And then came a huge outcry, not just among scientists but from the general public. NASA Chief Sean O’Keefe began receiving 400 emails a day from “Hubble Huggers”; ABC news reported that “thousands” of schoolchildren wrote letters.
Senator Barbara Mikulski led the opposition in Congress, and Representative Mark Udall introduced legislation requiring an independent panel of experts to look into the matter. The National Academy of Sciences piled on with criticism of the decision, leading to the resignation of an important NASA administrator.
The agency soon relented and in 2009 sent up a crew to repair the equipment and replace its systems—including a UV instrument 35 times as sensitive as its predecessor. The astronauts completed the job in two spacewalks, and to this day Hubble is going strong. Some experts think the telescope could be bringing back images of deep space into 2030 and maybe beyond. (Note the critical role of astronauts and robots working together for the biggest bang for the buck.)
The telescope’s fan base also remains strong; its Facebook page has more than two million likes, and more than 1.5 million are following it on Instagram.
A NASA team mapped the terrain and pointed out the right flat spot. And then the agency surprised us.
Read MoreIt really wasn’t that long ago when the two greatest superpowers were vying to put satellites into space. Now, 50 nations have their own satellites in low Earth orbit. If you’re a Thailand, say, you can call Space Systems/Loral, a Canadian-owned company based in Palo Alto, California, and tell them you want to put a satellite into geostationary orbit for television broadcasting or military communications. You can have the thing in orbit 25,000 miles above Earth within two years.