45 Years Since Apollo 11

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon forty-five years ago, just a little over eight years after President Kennedy called for the US "to go to the moon in this decade."

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon... (interrupted by applause) we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Eight years. The US did it in eight years with computers orders of magnitude more primitive than we have in the iPhones we carry around in our pockets. Would somebody please explain to me why we haven't put an astronaut on Mars yet?

Voyager 1 has reached interstellar space

Astonishing.

"The confirmation that the craft had reached interstellar space was announced this week, thanks to some additional data from a third CME shock Voyager 1 observed in March of this year. By reaching interstellar space, it essentially means the craft has made it into the massive, empty expanse that exists between solar systems."

Launched 37 years ago and not just still functioning, but communicating with Earth despite having traveled more than 11 BILLION miles. Voyager 1 stands as one of the greatest engineering feats in human history and the bar gets raised every mile it travels.

I wonder if we'll ever be able to build a spacecraft fast enough to fly out, pick it up, and bring it home.

The Greatest Hack of All Time

This was possibly NASA's finest moment ever. If you've seen Apollo 13, you know what I'm talking about.

The one time in history when making a square peg fit into a round hole was a literal matter of life-and-death.

"This is the mother of all hacks, the genius device that saved the Apollo XIII crew from dying in their emergency return to Earth, as photographed during that trip using one of their Hasselblad cameras. Here are the actual step-by-step instructions that helped turn this mission into NASA's most successful failure ever."

Follow the link to read the actual instructions NASA cobbled together for building the adapter. The engineers who figured that thing out were a bunch of steely-eyed missile men.

Make it so...

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"What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." — Napoleon Hill

I'd give real money to see this in my lifetime.

"NASA scientist Harold White unveiled a new concept design for a spaceship with a faster-than-light-speed warp drive engine yesterday that most sci-fi fans will probably describe as gorgeous...

...To be clear, we haven’t yet figured out how to create a warp drive, but that isn’t stopping White from imagining what a warp drive-powered vehicle might look like."