On this day in
1958, the U.S. Congress passed
legislation establishing
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space,
on July 29, 1958.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-29/nasa-created
NASA has since sponsored space
expeditions, both human and mechanical, that have yielded vital information
about the solar system and universe. It has also launched numerous
earth-orbiting satellites that have been instrumental in everything from
weather forecasting to navigation to global communications.
NASA was created in response to the Soviet Union’s
October 4, 1957 launch of its first satellite, Sputnik
I. The 183-pound, basketball-sized satellite
orbited the earth in 98 minutes. The Sputnik
launch caught Americans by surprise and sparked fears that the Soviets might
also be capable of sending missiles with nuclear weapons from Europe to
America. The United States prided itself on being at the forefront of
technology, and, embarrassed, immediately began developing a response,
signaling the start of the U.S.-Soviet
space race.
On November 3, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik II, which carried a dog named Laika.
In December, America attempted to launch a satellite of its own, called Vanguard, but it exploded shortly after
takeoff. On January 31, 1958, things went better with Explorer
I, the first U.S. satellite to successfully orbit the earth.
In July of that year, Congress passed
legislation officially establishing NASA from the National Advisory Committee
for Aeronautics and other government agencies, and confirming the country’s
commitment to winning the space race. In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy
declared that America should put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. On
July 20, 1969, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission achieved that goal and
made history when astronaut Neil
Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon, famously
declaring “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."
WATCH: Footage from the 1969
Apollo 11 moon landing
NASA has continued to make great advances
in space exploration since the first moonwalk, including playing a major part
in the construction of the International Space Station. The agency has also
suffered tragic setbacks, however, such as the disasters that killed the crews
of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the
Columbia space shuttle in 2003.
Here are some surprising facts about NASA:
1) Vodka had
a lot to do with the launching of SPUTNIK, and the link below provides the details:
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/11/vodka-and-internet.html
2) Roughly
7% of the American public still believes that the moon landing was faked.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/3712/landing-man-moon-publics-view.aspx
3)
The moon landing was made possible due to
the efforts of three black women in the early 1960’s. One of them is Katherine
Johnson – a fact that people like Stephen Miller will never accept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson
Creola Katherine Johnson (née Coleman, previously Goble; August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020) was an
American mathematician and human computer whose
calculations of orbital
mechanics as a NASA employee
were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed
spaceflights During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics,
she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped
pioneer the use of computers to perform tasks previously requiring humans. The
space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first
African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".
Johnson's work included calculating trajectories, launch windows,
and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights,
including those for astronauts Alan Shepard (the
first American in space) and John Glenn (the first
American in orbit), and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on
flights to the Moon. Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle
program, and she worked on plans for a human mission to
Mars.
In 2015 President Barack Obama awarded
Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016,
she received the Silver Snoopy
Award from NASA astronaut Leland D. Melvin and
a NASA Group Achievement Award. She was portrayed
by Taraji P. Henson in
the 2016 film Hidden Figures.
In 2019, the United States
Congress awarded Johnson the Congressional
Gold Medal and NASA announced the establishment of the Katherine
Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility in her
home state of West Virginia In 2021, she was posthumously inducted into
the National Women's Hall of Fame
There
are some events in our history that we will never forget.
When
(and where) we were when we got married.
We
all know exactly where we were when we heard that JFK had been shot.
We
all know exactly where we were when Neil Armstrong took his first step on the
moon.
To
give you an idea who remarkable the moon landing was, consider these facts:
A modern iPhone is millions
of times more powerful than the technology NASA used
during the 1969 moon landing, possessing vastly superior processor speeds, RAM,
and storage capacity.
Apollo
11 Guidance Computer (1969)
- Processor Speed: Operated at
roughly 0.043 MHz.
- RAM / Memory: Had about 4 KB
to 64 KB of total memory (with magnetic core RAM around 2 KB to 4 KB).
- Storage: Limited read-only core memory
equivalent to roughly 32 KB to 72 KB. [1,
- Modern iPhone (Today)
- Processor Speed: Runs well over
2,400 MHz (2.4+ GHz) across multiple cores, making it over 100,000 times
faster in raw processing.
- RAM / Memory: Features 6 GB
to 8 GB+ of RAM—millions of times larger than the Apollo system.
- Storage: Offers storage capacities up to
1 TB (1,000,000,000 KB), millions of times more capacity than the historic
guidance hardware.
