A Chinese space station falls to Earth, Hubble continues to astonish, and other stellar highlights from April 2018. See them all here.
See astronauts jammin’ on the space station, a rocket bound for Mars and more stellar highlights from May 2018 here.
The reusable first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully lands on a drone ship, March 30, 2017.
(SpaceX)
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.”
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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“My dad goes all over the world and learns about the news. One time he met a king. I want to be a reporter too. If I was a reporter right now, I’d probably write a story about if NASA was going to launch a new rocket into space. I’d start by going to the Director of NASA. Then I’d ask him about his rockets. And if any of them were going to space.”
Pretty cool!
President John F. Kennedy and rocket guru Dr. Wernher von Braun at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in 1962. (NASA)
March 11, 1969 – The Apollo 10 rocket and launch tower, atop the ginormous crawler-transporter, inches its way to Launch Complex 39 at Kennedy Space Center. (NASA)
