Elon Musk’s dreams of Mars just got way more real. On April 27, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, tweeted that a modified version of its Dragon space capsule could land on Mars as early as 2018. The details are pretty scary, though.
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In the 1940s, an elite team of mathematicians and scientists started working on a project that would carry the U.S. into space, then onto the moon and Mars. They would eventually become NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (or JPL), but here’s what made them so unusual: Many of the people who charted the course to space exploration were actually women.
Nathalia Holt tells their story in her new book, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. Holt tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro that the women worked as “computers.”
“In a time before the digital devices that we’re used to today, it was humans that were doing the calculations,” she says. “And so you needed these teams of people — many of whom were women, especially during World War II — and they were responsible for the math.”
Barbara Paulson was one of those women. She tells Shapiro that while her sisters were preparing to be secretaries, she took a different path. She says, “I had had quite a bit of math in high school. … I know my mother certainly wanted us all to graduate from college, but why I veered off into this … I can’t remember. … But I did, and it helped me get the job that I did get at JPL.”
See astronauts jammin’ on the space station, a rocket bound for Mars and more stellar highlights from May 2018 here.
The Project Apollo Archive is NASA fan Kipp Teague’s collection of previously unavailable pictures of NASA’s space history, from pre-Apollo program to present. We’ve paired some of them with buried quotes from the mission transcripts that show the grainy, gritty, and funny side of space exploration.
Pretty neat!
August 5, 1968 – “Apollo Spacecraft 101 Command/Service Modules being moved into position for mating with Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA)-5 in the Kennedy Space Center’s Manned Spacecraft Operations Building. Apollo Spacecraft 101 will be flown on the first manned Apollo space mission, Apollo 7 (Spacecraft 101/Saturn 205).“ (NASA)
May 15, 1963 – The Mercury-Atlas 9 mission lifts off from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, sending Gordon Cooper on a 22-orbit odyssey around the Earth. It was the final manned space mission of the Mercury program.
A key question that’s often left out of #retirement planning: Will seniors have enough income to afford the local cost of living?
