Knowledge Category: Articles & Publications

Don Cohen, Managing Editor When Megan was fourteen years old, she started to have trouble swallowing and keeping food down.

By Judith L. Robinson The human system is one of the most complex elements of space exploration missions. Our current long-duration space flight knowledge comes primarily from missions of up to six months’ duration.

By Don Cohen Dr. Charles Kennel was associate administrator for the Office of the Mission to Planet Earth from 1994 to 1996, when he helped restructure NASA’s Earth Observing System.

By Piers Bizony I am endlessly curious about the logic of NASA’s hardware designs and mission architectures, but I am a writer by trade and an engineer only in the armchair sense.

By Steve Goo My first teacher in rocketry had a saying: “Pointy end up and fire out the bottom.” His description of a perfect takeoff didn’t mean that the execution was simple.

By Kerry Ellis As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Galileo used his telescope to turn Ptolemy’s geocentric theory on its ear, astronomers have continually sought better ways to look into the heavens to discern what exists in the depths of our star-studded universe.

By Matthew Kohut Suppose you had to design a door within a lunar lander module that would shield the crew habitat from solar activity during a moon mission. Assuming this isn’t already your day job at NASA, how would you begin to devise a solution?

By Svetlana Shkolyar What do the rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun, 1950s television programs and magazine articles, and an emerging corporation focused on the human settlement of Mars have in common?

By Barry Goldstein The Phoenix Mars mission was born of failure. Like the mythical Phoenix bird that rose from the ashes of the previous generation’s Phoenix, the mission was born out of the “remains” of earlier attempts.