nasa
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Hidden No More: NASA Honors Its ‘Hidden Figures’ With a Street Renaming
Mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson were memorably immortalized onscreen by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe (respectively) in the award-winning 2016 film Hidden Figures. Now, NASA is giving the trio a permanent place of honor, having renamed the street of its headquarters, the 300 block of E Street in Washington,…
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To the Stars and Beyond: A Single Mom Gets to Intern at NASA, Thanks to Crowdfunding From Strangers
One small step from a community of strangers just translated to a giant leap for Georgia State University Ph.D. student India Jackson. The single mom earned a highly competitive summer internship at NASA’s field center in Houston but was daunted by the fact that she’d have to fund her own travel, housing and living expenses…
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'Hidden Figure' Shelby Jacobs, Who Designed a Camera System for NASA, Finally Getting His Due Nearly 51 Years Later
If you have ever seen the iconic images of NASA’s Apollo 6 launch that took place in 1968, you have seen Shelby Jacobs’ work, whether you realized it or not. In 1965, Jacobs was given the task of designing a camera system that could capture the rocket separations for the unmanned Apollo 6 launch. He…
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3 Black Girls Competing to Win Trip to NASA Reportedly Hacked by Racists
Although it has been reported that NASA shut down voting after a team of three black girls was handily winning a contest it sponsored, it appears that what happened was that someone hacked the system to take votes away from the girls, and that’s why the contest was shut down before the stated official voting…
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See, This Is Exactly Why I Don’t Be Going to Space: An Astronaut Came Back to Earth With an Altered Genetic Makeup
In what reads like the beginning of a sci-fi book, astronaut Scott Kelly had the club going up … to space, and when he returned to terra firma, he was a changed man. Genetically. That man’s genes were different. Seven percent of his prespace genetic makeup was altered. I realize that sometimes things blow my…
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Why Was NASA Astronaut Jeanette Epps Removed From International Space Station Mission? Racism, Her Brother Says
Last summer, it was announced that NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps would become the first African-American International Space Station crew member, after she was chosen to go on the June 2018 mission. Of course, we now know that those plans have changed, with news breaking last week that NASA had decided to pull Epps off the…
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Jeanette Epps Will Not Become the 1st African-American International Space Station Crew Member; NASA Pulled Her Off the Team
Last year, amid the buzz and hype of the movie Hidden Figures—which tells the story of three African-American women who were crucial in the launch of the first American into orbit—the story of NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps also took flight. Epps was scheduled to become the first African American to call the International Space Station…
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I Paid Attention to the Cotton Fields of Alabama for the 1st Time
I’m a Southerner. Like most of my fellow military brats, I spent a considerable amount of my youth growing up in Europe (in my case, Frankfurt, Germany), but I was raised by two black Southerners—my father and stepmother—and during the summers, I split time between Michigan (where my birth mother lives; I hate making these…
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NASA Dedicates Building to Hidden Figures Heroine Katherine Johnson
When NASA’s Langley Research Center built its newest, state-of-the-art research facility in Hampton, Va., it was only right that they named it after Katherine Johnson, the NASA engineer and subject of the book and Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures. “You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy,” the 99-year-old math genius said when she heard…
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President Pee-Pee Talks Urine With an Astronaut
President Pee-Pee really needs to stop playing shy. During a video conference with NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station on Monday, the president—yes the man who allegedly had Russian prostitutes urinate all over a bed that former President Barack Obama had slept in—got all squeamish after learning that the astronauts clean their urine for…