Newton's first law describes how, once in motion, planets remain in motion. What it does not do is explain how the planets are observed to move in nearly circular orbits rather than straight lines. Enter the second law. To move in a curved path, a planet must have an acceleration toward the center of the circle. This is called centripetal acceleration and is supplied by the mutual gravitational…
This e-book explores some of the contributions of psychology to yesterday’s great space race, today’s orbiter and International Space Station missions, and tomorrow’s journeys beyond Earth’s orbit. Early missions into space were typically brief, and crews were small, often drawn from a single nation. As an intensely competitive space race has given way to international cooperation over …
During World War II, advances in aviation became unmistakable. Many nations’ air forces entered the war flying biplane aircraft that were not much different from their predecessors of the previous world war. They were soon eclipsed by aircraft that took advantage of new designs that utilized many aeronautical advances of the interwar period such as new powerplants, stressed-skin aluminum stru…
NASA engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center, along with their partners at other NASA centers and in private industry, are designing and building the next generation of rockets and spacecraft to transport cargo, equipment, and human explorers to space. Known collectively as Deep Space Exploration Systems, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and ground systems at Kenned…
Money is anything that is widely accepted as a form of payment for goods and services or repayment of debts. In the limited economies of POW camps, cigarettes became money as soon as they became the accepted form of payment for rations that prisoners were exchanging. In developed economies, such as the United States, the use of commodities as money has been replaced with paper currency endorsed…
In 1960, the United States put its first Earth-observing environmental satellite into orbit around the planet. Over the decades, these satellites have provided invaluable information, and the vantage point of space has provided new perspectives on Earth. This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere. The bo…
NASA initiated GeneLab—a multiyear, multiphase project—on the premise that mining of omics data from spaceflight experiments offers an immense opportunity to understand the effects of spaceflight on biological systems. That progress can best be accomplished by ensuring access to these data to as many researchers as possible. GeneLab captures vast amounts of data from spaceflight and gro…
Advances made during decades of spaceflight experimentation have identified critical gaps in our understanding of the role of gravity and the spaceflight environment on plant biology at the cellular, tissue, whole plant, and community levels. The International Space Station is a unique platform where reduced gravity can be used to probe and dissect biological mechanisms in plants for underst…
Addressing a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical scientists about the ease of establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity …
It is a basic premise of the Wind and Beyond series that nothing about the historical development of aircraft has ever been linear. On the way to aeronautical “progress”—however one chooses to define the term—there has always been, and always will be, countless twists and turns. And in the end, the entire story could have turned out differently—and still may. It is hoped that not only…