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From the beggining |
Where we are now |
Humankind has always been inquisitive, needing to understand why things behave in a certain way, and trying to link observation with prediction
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The discovery of a super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a sun-like star brings us closer than ever to finding a twin of our own watery world. But NASA’s Kepler space telescope has captured evidence of other potentially habitable planets amid the sea of stars in the Milky Way galax
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What the heck is NASA for?
It's like asking what a panda is for. We adore pandas, but they're evolutionary train wrecks. Look at the skull of a panda and you see the vicious teeth of a carnivore. Yet it gnaws on bamboo. The panda's jaw and its gut are totally unsuited to grind and digest a woody grass, and as a consequence, it spends most of the day just trying to cram enough bamboo in its face to stay alive. Countless years ago, the panda's ancestors attempted to get an advantage over its competitors by settling on an oddly specific diet that nobody else could stomach. While the choice gave the panda a short-term advantage (the pandas never had to fight for their bamboo supper), it turned out to be a poor choice in the long term. In short, the panda overspecialized, and ever since then, it's been trying to survive. NASA is the panda of the U.S. government: a great big cuddly maladapted agency that's beloved by almost everyone—and that is flirting with extinction. NASA was formed in 1958, in response to Sputnik's Russian-accented beep-beep-beep circling over our heads, to challenge the Soviet juggernaut, the Communist machine that was thumbing its nose at us from orbit. A little more than a decade later, in July 1969, NASA astronauts left their boot prints on the lunar regolith. Mission accomplished. The space race was over. America had won. NASA had captured the public's imagination by putting men on the moon, one of the pinnacles of human achievement. But after the climax, the government immediately lost interest in getting its rockets off to the moon again. Less than half a year after Apollo 11, NASA began canceling Apollo missions. Apollo 20 was first to go, and as the agency's budget detumesced, two others soon followed. (Nixon reportedly considered canceling even more.) The moon race was history. On to the next act. |