Apollo 11 Reentry — 50 Years Ago, Today

The Apollo 11 command module entered the atmosphere at 16:35:05 GMT (11:35:05 Houston…

How Mission Control Centers Work

A Mission Control Center (MCC) is a facility from which personnel operate remote resources needed to conduct a mission. In the case of NASA, that usually means a spacecraft. Below is a picture of MCC-H, the NASA Mission Control Center for the International Space Station…

Christmas at NASA

After a 15 hour day that began with a three hour meeting and ended with a six hour software testing session that required sending 67 pages of commands. I thought I’d take a walk through the grove, before driving home.

What to do if your child wants to be an astronaut?

To Inspire and Motivate Her LEAST EXPENSIVE OPTIONS

Calculating the Mass of the Sun

So, let’s see if we can calculate the mass of the Sun based on observational data…

It is over complicating it a bit to worry about the influences of the other bodies. They do influence, but…

Growing Plants Onboard the ISS

There have been numerous experiments into plant growth in space. It’s important to scientists on the…

Why planets move back and forth in the sky

We don’t really perceive depth when we look up at the stars and planets. They all appear to be moving across a flat plane. In the below picture, we have an inner planet and an outer planet. We can pretend they are the Earth and Mars, if we want. The inner…

Review: The Ordinary Spaceman: From Boyhood Dreams to Astronaut

Full disclosure, I know Clay. His…

Great Books to Read for the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary

This week is the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. That has gotten people excited about this adventure that mankind accomplished half a century ago. That made me think it was a good time to share some of my favorite books on…

50 Years Ago Today

For millennia our species has looked up at the moon and imagined walking on its surface. Almost 2000 years ago, a writer…