Quotes Tagged "nasa"

When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for comber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.)

And I know that we won't be able to escape it in deep space, either. We might succeed in ignoring this doubt for a while—keep everyone so busy doing what it takes to build the ships to get us out there. But eventually the bustle ends, and then we're left with ourselves again. It'll be the loneliest revelation ever—half a million miles from home.

On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as “bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.

Although many people, for example, believe the Mars Rover robots are champions of Artificial Intelligence, the robots do not “employ state-of-the-art AI algorithms.” Dey said he learned the distinction while collaborating with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory dedicated to robotic exploration of the solar system. AI algorithms require extensive energy consumption to be computed — something that would quickly put the rover out of action in outer space. “On Mars, while exploring several large craters where sunlight might never reach, the rover has to commute and communicate in an optimized fashion with the least amount of external power source,” he said. “And having the state-of-the-art AI algorithm on such a robot would only drain the power source quicker.” But that doesn’t mean the rover isn’t smart in its own way. “Every ounce of the robot is optimized to perform the best at minimal cost,” he said. “So, next time, if you hear about Mars rover then be aware that it is the hard work and dedication of several intelligent researchers and engineers who had made that machine intelligent enough to do its job.

NASA has spin-offs, and it's a huge and very impressive list, including accurate and affordable LASIK eye surgery.

'Satellite archaeology' refers to the use of NASA and commercial high resolution satellite datasets to map and discover past structures, cities, and geological features.

I'm actually a NASA brat. My father was a rocket scientist. He started working at NASA before it was NASA in 1959.

In 1966, NASA took over in space, and it has been a bureaucratic mess ever since.

NASA, and all the other spacefaring nations of the world, have agreed to a set of 'planetary-protection' principles, aimed at preventing the accidental contamination of another habitable world with organisms from Earth.

Trillions of dollars in out-of-control entitlement spending cannot be remedied by cuts in NASA, or even in the entire discretionary budget, defense included. Rather, the financial bleeding needs to be staunched where the hole is and nowhere else.

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

At Indy, we are the NASA of the production-car world, and that's clearly why manufacturers are involved - it's such a good testbed.

Space in general gave us GPS - that's not specifically NASA, but it's investments in space.

Even though NASA tries to simulate launch, and we practice in simulators, it's not the same - it's not even close to the same.

Science fiction writers didn't predict the fade-out of NASA's manned space operations, and they weren't prepared with alternative routes to space when that decline became undeniable.

'The Martian' may be fiction, but at NASA, we are working to make it a reality.

The first year I was at NASA, I was only responsible for optical and ultraviolet astronomy. Frankly, there wasn't much else.

All the NASA footage is in the public domain, and it's so beautiful; it's really stunning.

A lot of missions for NASA or experiments on accelerators happen through a whole process of scientific retreats, long-range planning, forming collaborations to do studies - all this kind of stuff. It's very democratic.

In 1983, NASA invited Canada to fly three payload specialists, in part because we had contributed the robotic arm that is used on the shuttle.