A Quote by Lonnie Johnson
I wound up getting offered a job at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I invented a power supply mechanism for the Galileo space craft which was in orbit around Jupiter until 2003.
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On Sunday August 5, 2012, I was among a group of people who witnessed the Rover landing on Mars in real time at NASA's Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Most Jupiter-sized planets orbit the mother star in a highly elliptical orbit. This means they will often cross the orbit of any Earth-like planet and fling it into outer space, making life impossible. But our Jupiter travels in a near-perfect circular orbit, preventing a collision with any Earth-like planet, making life possible.
The hazards posed by Near-Earth Asteroids are assessed by Sentry, a computer system developed by the Near-Earth Objects Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The software factors together a cosmic rock's coordinates, distance, velocity, and gravitational influences to calculate its trajectory.
As Stewart Brand (co-founder of Emeryville's Global Business Network) likes to say, "Information lasts forever. Digital information lasts forever or for five years, whichever comes first." There are examples everywhere. The tapes from the original Viking landers that went to Mars are at (NASA's) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but there is no machine that can read the tapes.
I think that some of the earliest ideas in the modern period were actually from astronomy. You look at Galileo: He goes up and points his telescope up at Jupiter and finds out, hey, Jupiter has these moons.
I like to think of 'the studio' as a laboratory where I can go in, learn tricks, apply, revise, and release. I'd figure I had about the same emotional attachment to my craft as a guy over at NASA does over... NASA stuff.
When I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in the early '80s is when I first got the idea. The Super Soaker was based on some engineering principles that I applied. I was actually working on another invention which was a heat pump that would use water as a working fluid instead of Freon.
Qian Xuesen, the father of the Chinese Space Program, studied in the United States, and he was a protégé of Theodore Von Carmen's at Cal Tech and helped start the jet propulsion laboratory there, and then he got caught up in the anti-communism wave and was accused of being a spy and was actually deported back to China where he built from nothing, their entire missile and space program. So, in a way, in a very real way, the United States in trying to protect so-called protect our secrets and throwing this guy out of the country, we helped seed and start the Chinese missile program.
When NASA says they're going into space, they don't mean up and back. They mean orbit.
NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.
The very first experiments with building rockets and firing them off were carried out by students at Cal Tech in 1937, '38 and '39. And later these people put together these jet propulsion labs in Pasadena and wound up sending aircraft and spacecraft to the moon. So it all began very primitively with love.
Not until the space shuttle started flying did NASA concede that some astronauts didn't have to be fast-jet pilots. And at that point, sure enough, women started becoming astronauts.
I'd like to get shot into space. I'd like to potentially visit the moon. I don't know if I can do that in the next couple years, but I spent some time at the jet propulsion lab, looking out at the future of when a guy like me can do a little space travel.
I'm always involved with the Aerospace Program and NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center. And if kids feel so inclined, they can log onto NASA and the Optimus Prime Spinoff Award, which we present every year to some of the brilliant young minds that are taking up into the academics of space, science, technology, math.
Space is not just going up and coming back down again. Space is getting into orbit and being there, living there, establishing a presence, a permanence.
We need to be very thoughtful about how we propose to spend the money that NASA does have for space exploration. And we need to be clear that there's the human spaceflight part of NASA, and there's the science space part of NASA, and there's also aeronautics. Those are all very different things that NASA does.
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