Interesting Facts about NASA

Since it was founded by President Eisenhower in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been in the forefront in the field of space science in the world. Here are some more interesting facts about NASA that you need to know!

A lot of people may not know it, but a lot of politicians relied to NASA for their military and strategic powers as the United States was just beginning to delve into the future technology as a means for world dominance. ARPA (now DARPA) was created in the same year as NASA to develop space technology for military purposes. When NASA was established it took all of the aviation and space projects from ARPA. For a time NASA provided rockets for firing up bombs as the military wanted it to do.

“Project Mercury” was one of NASA’s first programs. Its objective is to send a human into the Earth orbit and then return him to Earth safely.

Project Mercury

Don’t call NASA employees lazy — they are all college graduates, with PhD’s, have outstanding records as fighter jet pilots and scientists, and they’re in excellent top condition. However, NASA pays around $9,000 a month just to watch you lying in bed!

NASA lets potential astronauts to simply lie in bed and kill time while its researchers are performing tests on you. Yep, you’ll be doing literally nothing! This study is designed for NASA’s researchers to look into the effects of zero gravity on the human body when the person travels in space.

President Eisenhower established ASA as a civilian (not military) means to conduct peaceful space explorations.

Yep, you’ll be just one text message away from seeing the ISS in the sky!

In order to get notifications about the ISS status, go to NASA’s “Spot the Station” page, (http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/index.cfm) and register for email and text alerts whenever the space probe is due to hover over your area.

You may actually view the ISS with your naked eye without the help of any tools, so better sign up if you want to see the space facility passing overhead in your area.

If it weren’t for his buddy Dick Day who covertly slipped his application into a stack of papers, he would have been turned down (and thus he would have not made his historic walk on the moon).

So, is it fact or fiction? NASA spent millions of dollars to develop a special pen that could upside-down, while the Soviet cosmonauts were content with writing with their pencils. Actually, that’s a hoax. It was actually an idea from a private company who manufactured the pens and sold to NASA for their space missions — it was all a part of marketing gimmick.

Here are the the 12 men who made the historic walk on the moon:

– Neil Armstrong
– Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin
– Charles “Pete” Conrad
– Alan L. Bean
– Alan Shepard
– Edgar D. Mitchell
– David Randolph Scott
– James B. Irwin
– John Watts Young
– Charles M. Duke Jr.
– Harrison “Jack” Schmitt
– Eugene A. Cernan

Ever wonder how animals react to zero gravity? Since reports say that humans are generally not that adept on walking on low- or zero gravity, NASA has made a bizarre experiment employing animals to see how they would react to low- or zero gravity. They’ve used many kinds of mammals, frogs, birds and even insects for they hope that they would be well-equipped in dealing with low gravity. But unfortunately, the animals turned out to be the same as humans — not as graceful in low gravity as they were once assumed.

NASA

And this is the spacecraft that carried astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men on the moon (Armstrong landed first, while Aldrin followed some 20 minutes later).

Yes, NASA chiefly uses Armageddon as part of its training program. Then it asks its new wards if there can find any scientific inaccuracies in the film, and if any, how much.