Word: nasa
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...ours, it's hard to imagine a national effort so peopled by foreigners--German expat Wernher von Braun building our rockets, New Zealand immigrant William Pickering heading our unmanned program. In a time of flash-paper attention spans, it's similarly hard to picture any agency surviving the setbacks NASA did. Ranger 7 was the first unmanned U.S. ship to land on the moon--following the sequential failures of Rangers 1 through 6. Think that program would make it as far as Ranger 4 today...
...upset about the ad hoc way NASA settled who would be first to step on the moon? -Robert Newman, DALLASI felt we needed a decision to proceed with training, so I sort of forced the issue. What NASA did was absolutely correct. It would have been unacceptable for the commander to sit up in the lunar module while his co-pilot made the first historic step on the moon...
...leave NASA after returning home from the moon? -Gene McHugh, HOLLYWOOD, MDIt would have been pretty hard to top the moon landing. Neil Armstrong elected to stay with NASA in aeronautics, and I, being more of a military person, left to continue my career in the U.S. Air Force. There were a lot of other people who wanted to walk on the moon, and we didn't want to be greedy...
...feel that NASA specifically, and the United States in general, still have the same clear vision of space exploration that existed in the 1960's? -Jeremy Slater, Houston, Texas No. I think we understand space exploration much better than we did back then. It is difficult to develop transportation systems that are economical and efficient. When we did get to the moon with Apollo it was very effective and efficient, but the flight rate was not high enough to justify making it reusable...
...Rochester astronomers are right, the idea that comets are pristine remnants of the material from which our solar system originally formed isn't going to hold up. Indeed, last year, comet-dust particles brought back by NASA's Stardust mission showed that the particles had been heated to high temperatures sometime in their lives, which implied that at least the dust in comets might not be primordial. And now it looks like the ice in them isn't either...