Samsung Galaxy S4 5' Smartphone [Sprint]NASA's history is necessarily wacky, checkered, and filled with secrecy. Throughout its life NASA has been involuntarily inserted into issues of national security and national fervor, forced to deal with all sorts of non-scientific priorities that confound their high-minded exploratory mindset. Not only that, the agency was pioneering a whole new form of science and planning to put people into conditions no human had ever experienced before.
Their ignorance, combined with neurotic double-checking, has led to some moments that seem, uh... optically difficult. Other times, they're just straight up weird - but try not to judge too hard. These guys were putting humans in space literally before we knew where space began. They can be forgiven a bit of eccentricity.
The Shake Test
As mentioned, it's easy to look back at certain past actions and scoff - but this was a legitimate test at the time. While today we think of NASA tests as going on in meticulously controlled wind tunnels and vacuum chambers, early Apollo program technology was so experimental they needed to test its basic physical properties. Forget complex ideas like ablation and heat damage - could these new-fangled space ships withstand the physical tortures of a launch to space?
Just the violent shaking of the wind was enough to scare early NASA engineers, and so they created the shake test: get a bunch of guys, grab your thing, and shake it around. If something falls off, fix it so it doesn't happen anymore. That might sound silly, but it worked. In the test shown above, a Saturn V rocket lost its escape tower, and while I might not know what that does I do know you don't want it falling off. Good job, shake test!
Gold foilNASA too-often comes under attack from not being frugal enough. With so many driven, brilliant individuals, so few of whom are overly concerned with feathering their nests, the nation's space agency is actually one of its most frugal institutions. Sure, it spends a lot of money - but it has to. There's no better example of this than gold foil, and NASA's extensive use of it.
Gold, while expensive and almost comically opulent for industrial use, has a ton of useful characteristics. It has a high heat capacity so it works for shielding, and reflects a lot of the remaining light for extra protection. It's dense enough to stop some higher-energy particles, and perfectly conducting for electronics work. Gold won't tarnish or oxidize, and along with its physical malleability this makes it much easier (and cheaper) to work with while still inside Earth's atmosphere. In all, gold foil may seem unnecessary, but it's a quirky tool that's absolutely vital to NASA's overall goals.
Animals in zero gravity
Take a look at the header image on this article, which shows an astronaut walking suspended against a tilted wall - though his blood distribution and natural sense of direction are out of whack, this tester is experiencing about a Moon's worth of pull straight down onto his feet. There's no video available, but reports say that humans are in general less than spectacular at figuring out how to walk in low gravity. Thus, NASA has spent many years running animal behavioral experiments involving low- or zero-g - maybe some animal just happens to already have a well-evolved way of dealing with low gravity? Unfortunately for the astronauts (and the animals) they really don't.
NASA has sent up frogs, birds, mammals, insects, fish, and everything in-between. Had funding been infinite, I'm sure they would have eventually tried a platypus. None of them managed very well, no matter how many tries they got and, interestingly, the more evolved for flight on Earth they were the worse they seemed to be at figuring out zero gravity. Most of these tests were conducted on parabolic flights, though, so the weightlessness only lasted about 90 seconds at most.
NASA and the military
Many people don't know it, but as the US was just starting to push into future-tech as a means to global dominance many politicians looked to NASA as a source of military and strategic power. It may seem idiotic to put a scientific organization in that position, but that's the point - NASA wasn't always a scientific organization. In its early days, ARPA (now DARPA) actually had to struggle with NASA, who eventually took all of their aviation projects (many were later given back for security reasons).
The military wanted NASA to develop rockets for delivering bombs, not astronauts, and the agency was for a time quite happy to oblige; if there's one thing soldiers know, it's how to get and stay funded. NASA was actually a fairly relevant political entity, even outside the inflated context of the space race, and there was a time when we did not draw such a hard distinction between scientific and political space projects. Partially because their skills are no longer quite so specialized, and partly because it's difficult to deal with scientists in the context of national security, NASA quickly became a nerd haven. Its most security- and economy-focused projects went to DARPA, the NSA, and elsewhere - and thus, post Cold War, its funding stagnated. That pretty much brings us up to date.
The space pen never happenedThis is a pet peeve of mine. That famous space pen, the one that cost NASA millions while the Soviets worked happily with pencils? Come on. This is NASA; they don't need to spend millions to make a pen that writes upside down. More to the point, there is a reason to use pens in space as opposed to pencils, and that reason is zero gravity; in the super-recycled environments of space vessels, assisted by zero gravity, dust from a 'lead' pencil will migrate into the air filtration system and gum up the works. It could even cause negative effects for astronauts who breathe it in - though that's not confirmed so far as I know. All I do know is that you won't find too many Russian cosmonauts using pencils - nor Chinese taikonauts.
NASA pays people to do nothingOf all the criticisms you could level at your average astronaut, laziness is not one of them. Most of these people have PhDs, often impeccable records as fighter pilots or researchers, and they're all in top physical condition. Even so, the confines of space are, were, and are going to be, very restrictive. Just as with the animal gravity tests, it's necessary for NASA to look into the physical effects of that inactivity if they're going to send people all the way to Mars and - presumably - back. That's why NASA has, and from time to time still does, pay people to sit around doing nothing. Literally - nothing.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will pay select applicants something like $9,000 per month to lay in bed, and not get out. For up to 70 days, participants will spend every moment laying down. Now, NASA could just look at hospital-bound patients for much of this data, but the point is to use healthy people who voluntarily avoid exercise, either by staying in bed or going to space. Keeping these participants healthy is priority number one - and as they learn how to do that more effectively, they also learn how to get healthy astronauts to the Red Planet and beyond.
NASA is actually designing a warp driveIt might sound crazy, but NASA does actually have a team of wild-haired geniuses working on sci-fi inspired ideas that seem at once at odds with a hard scientific institution. A warp drive? The Innovative Advanced Concepts lab has taken a serious, physicist's look at the issue, looking at the actual feasibility of bending space-time to go faster than light. That's right - though light may be totally unbeatable in terms of speed through space, we might be able to get around that by actually adjusting the amount of space through which we must travel.
A proposed warp drive actually 'works' by creating a space-time expansion behind the ship and a compression in front of it, essentially carrying the ship forward on a wave made of space-time. Sure, it would take virtually unthinkable amounts of energy to actually do it - but that's the sort of linear problem we're good at fixing. They went so far as to mock up some CG renders of what such a ship might actually look like. The above image is supplemented by a host of other closeup renders.
NASA has a long history and, by virtue of its mission to look and move into the deepest possible unknowns, a quirky one as well. It's been staffed by some of the most brilliant and troubled figures in American history, and pushed humanity through many of its most enduring obstacles.
It's not just forgivable that the agency has a checkered past - it's a fundamental and necessary part of its lofty goals. Asking NASA to be less weird would be to ask it to aim lower, and think more firmly within the box. That's the last thing we want to do right now.
Entities 0 Name: NASA Count: 26 1 Name: DARPA Count: 2 2 Name: Earth Count: 2 3 Name: ARPA Count: 1 4 Name: US Count: 1 5 Name: Moon Count: 1 6 Name: Samsung Galaxy Count: 1 7 Name: NSA Count: 1 8 Name: National Aeronautics and Space Administration Count: 1 9 Name: Innovative Advanced Concepts lab Count: 1 10 Name: Saturn Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1q8bVHf Title: Nope, this isn't how NASA gets ready to roast a chicken. In fact, this image shows its engineers tes Description: Nope, this isn't how NASA gets ready to roast a chicken. In fact, this image shows its engineers testing the sunshield for the NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The size of a tennis court, it folds up like an umbrella--so has to be tested extensively to make sure the five layers of thin membrane can unfurl reliably in space.
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