Ever wondered how the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed and how it has been a success and more popular than most space companies in the world? You are at the right place to learn more. Here’s how NASA became successful over the years.
Related media: NASA 2022: A Year Of Success
#1. Founded To Oppose A Soviet Satellite
During the Cold War which lasted from March 1947 through December 1991. Was a battle between the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) with a socialist approach and capitalism to enhance development. The Soviet Union launched the Soviet Satellite Sputnik in 1957. The following year in 1958 American president Dwight Eisenhower was in Washington, D.C. to oversee the space and aeronautics research.
#2. Employees Have Side Hustles
Though spacial and aeronautical engineering is very demanding, some NASA astronauts have taken up second jobs. There are over 17,000 employees of NASA. The flexible nature of work in the United States has made most of them do other jobs. Do you know that some are lawyers, health care workers, and many others including teachers?
#3. Ridiculous Internet Speed
Internet speed could be a worry to many while browsing even in the most advanced communities in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and other first-class nations. This cannot be said of NASA as it has an internet speed connection of approximately 91 gigabits per second (gbps). Amazing this internet speed cannot be compared to other future internet speed development.
According to World Population Review in 2021, the United Arab Emirates is the country with the fastest internet speed at 238.06 megabits per second (mbps). In comparison, that’s almost 100 billion times slower than what the Houston-based aerospace agency transmits. Could this be a myth?
#4. Satellites Named After Cartoon Characters
NASA loves cartoons to the extent that it named two of its satellites after a popular cartoon ‘Tom and Jerry.’ These satellites are spaced as what usually happens in cartoons. Thus, Tom, the cat chases Jerry the mouse. The satellites look like they are chasing each other in space. These satellites are under NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO).
#5. Mars Climate Orbiter Saga
In 1999, NASA launched a satellite dubbed the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO), as it was meant to probe the Martian atmosphere. This was the first weather observer on another planet. The 125-million-dollar orbiter was supposed to have reached its destination and was in a stable orbit, but scientists realized that it had vanished, and was gone for good.
The catch? NASA engineers failed to convert metric units to imperial units, so the satellite’s transmitters failed, and crashed. Future NASA missions such as Curiosity, Perseverance, and InSight all became a huge success due to this technical flaw.
Image credit: NASA
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Written by: Joseph Mensah, Mon, Feb 13, 2023.