Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Japan, the Shenzhou V launch was met with disbelief and anxiety that continues to reverberate among scientific and political circles. "We were surprised," says Masashi Okada, a launch-systems engineer at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the country's equivalent of NASA. "Obviously we knew they were working toward it, but they achieved manned flight very quickly." Japan's own space program had been in decline for years, hobbled by a habit of following the U.S.'s lead and by domestic regulatory barriers that bar programs with potential military applications. Between 1999 and 2004, the space program's budget...
...Japan already has a modest manned program, but it's dependent on the patronage of the U.S. Eight Japanese astronauts have been trained by NASA, and five of them have flown space-shuttle missions (including the flight of Discovery in August that marked the first shuttle mission since Columbia disintegrated upon reentry in 2003). At Tsukuba Space Center, JAXA's main campus, located about a 40-minute train ride northeast of Tokyo, Yoshiyuki Hasegawa and his team were recently putting the finishing touches on Japan's next small step. In a gigantic clean room the size of a warehouse, Hasegawa...
Japan may not have as large a space program as might be expected given the size of its economy. However this is due not to a lack of technological prowess, but to a lack of political will and funding. Donald Yeomans, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has worked with a number of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) engineers over the years and says he's consistently impressed by what they accomplish on a small budget: "They are not simply doing the easy things. They are ambitious and challenging themselves to develop...
...company R&D is a secretive thing, often taking place in isolated Skunk Works closed off from the rest of the company, to say nothing of the world. That's not the way things work at J.P.L. The lab is not owned by NASA but rather is a nonprofit, federally funded research center managed by the California Institute of Technology and does its work for NASA under contract. The academics who work there come from the world of peer review, in which even theoretical work isn't considered sound until a lot of objective eyes have had a chance...
...engineers working on, say, the propulsion system know what the engineers working on the camera system are thinking--a good thing, since cameras add weight, affecting thrust. Of the 70 or so missions that come before Team X in a year, only one or two are ever recommended to NASA. The group technique assures that those two missions are well thought through and, by this time, well loved. "I need them all to own the mission," says Oberto. "That's very important...