By the ASK Editorial Staff In March 2003, a team from five NASA centers, two Air Force groups, the Army, and Sandia National Laboratories began work on a hypersonic re-entry vehicle intended to serve as a flying technology test bed for thermal protection systems, flight controls, sensors, communications, and other vehicle systems that need to […]
By Bob Ward “Rocket scientist” Wernher von Braun remains a controversial figure. Even today, thirty-six years since his retirement from NASA and almost twenty-nine years after he departed planet Earth at the age of just sixty-five, the German-born engineer and physicist—and one-time enemy of the United States and its allies—still stands as an intriguing, dynamic, […]
By Carol Anne Dunn For fiscal year 2005, the Inventions and Contributions Board presented 2,917 NASA employees and contractors with more than $1,951,000 in Space Act Awards.
By Kerry Ellis On the morning of September 8, 2004, in a desert in the middle of Utah, two helicopters waited to pluck Genesis gently from the air and return it safely to the ground.
By Ken Atkins In the wee hours of Sunday morning, January 15, 2006, a 105-lb. entry vehicle carrying samples of dust from comet Wild 2 and interstellar particles from outside our solar system whizzed into our atmosphere at 29,000 mph.
By Ed Hoffman The Wikipedia (a comprehensive, free, online, editable encyclopedia that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago but for me demonstrates the power of change) defines change as the quality of impermanence and flux.
By Richard Day and Ed Rogers “The Board concludes that NASA’s current organization does not provide effective checks and balances, does not have an independent safety program, and has not demonstrated the characteristics of a learning organization.” — Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report (2003)1
Kerry Ellis Orlando Figueroa began his NASA career twenty-seven years ago at Goddard Space Flight Center, not knowing he would eventually become the Center’s Director of Applied Engineering and Technology — and Federal Employee of the Year.
Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap By 2006, almost half of NASA’s workers will be eligible for retirement, many of them in science and engineering.
