APOLLO 11 - 50th Anniversary

"What Apollo 11 pilot Michael Collins feared most during critical NASA mission" PBS NewsHour 7/17/2019

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SUMMARY:  This week marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which first landed American astronauts on the moon's surface.  Of the intrepid crew, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have tended to dominate public attention, but it was pilot Michael Collins who flew the command module to the moon -- and faced his own distinct concerns about the return trip.  Science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports.

"NASA opens a new collection of moon rocks to researchers" PBS NewsHour 7/20/2019

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SUMMARY:  Johnson Space Center in Houston houses more than 2,000 samples collected over six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972 from various parts of the moon.  The collection includes rocks, core samples, pebbles and dust that scientists are still learning from 50 years later.  Hari Sreenivasan reports on the laboratory keeping these artifacts safe.

"This retired astronaut captured hundreds of images in space" PBS NewsHour 7/20/2019

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SUMMARY:  Retired astronaut Scott Kelly spent a record-setting 340 days on the International Space Station.  And while he was there, he took hundreds of photographs that he compiled into a book: "Infinite Wonder: An Astronaut’s Photographs From A Year In Space."  He spoke with NewsHour Weekend about his experiences in space and the spectacular views of Earth.

"NASA looks to return astronauts to the moon" PBS NewsHour 7/20/2019

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SUMMARY:  Fifty years ago today, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the surface of the moon.  Now, for the first time since the Apollo program ended in 1972, NASA is planning an ambitious launch in 2024 to return astronauts to the moon, and to sustain a human presence there by 2028.  Hari Sreenivasan reports from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

AMERICA'S SPACE PROGRAM - The SpaceX Launch

"What the SpaceX launch means for America’s space program" PBS NewsHour 3/2/2019

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SUMMARY:  The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Saturday on its way to the International Space Station.  If the mission is successful, NASA astronauts could head into space from American soil later this year for the first time since 2011.  Loren Grush, a senior science reporter with The Verge, joins Hari Sreenivasan, to talk about the launch's significance.

COMMENT:  The SpaceX capsule carried a dummy named 'Ripply,' wonder if that's a reference to the Alien movie series and the lead character Ripply (Sigourney Weaver) who is found unconsciousness hibernation in a escape capsule.

NASA - New Horizons Flyby

"Why the latest New Horizons flyby represents a space exploration milestone" PBS NewsHour 1/1/2019

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SUMMARY:  On this New Year’s Day, NASA has a special reason to celebrate: Its spacecraft New Horizons has made a successful flyby of Ultima Thule, an object orbiting in space about four billion miles from Earth.  Science correspondent Miles O’Brien joins Jeffrey Brown to explain the immense difficulty of this mission and its larger significance for the U.S. space program.

NEWSHOUR BOOKSHELF - "Rise of the Rocket Girls"

"The unsung women heroes of America's space program" PBS NewsHour 6/30/2016

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SUMMARY:  They were living, breathing, walking, talking calculators who were key to America's early space program.  And they were women — and largely forgotten.  At the time, the supercomputers that NASA now uses to crunch its numbers didn't exist.  Nathalia Holt looks to change the historic oversight in her new book, “Rise of the Rocket Girls.”  Holt talked with Jeffrey Brown at the Los Angeles Book Festival.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Now the next addition to our summer reading list.

It's a look at some unsung American heroes in the space race, the women behind the scenes.

At the recent Los Angeles Book Festival, Jeffrey Brown sat down with Nathalia Holt, the author of “Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars.”

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Tell me, who were the rocket girls?

NATHALIA HOLT, Author, “Rise of the Rocket Girls”:  They are these unsung heroes who have touched just about every NASA mission that you can think of.

And yet they were mostly forgotten by NASA and by the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is where they worked.  These women worked as computers.  And so, before all of the digital devices we have today…

JEFFREY BROWN:  Now, wait a minute.  Explain that, because I know they're called literally 'computers.'

NATHALIA HOLT:  This is their job title.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Yes.

NATHALIA HOLT:  You actually needed humans to be able to do the calculations.

And so this is what they started out working as.  So, they only had pencil and paper, and these really loud mechanical calculators that couldn't do very much.  And, from that, they were able to calculate an incredible number of trajectories for spacecraft, propellants.

JEFFREY BROWN:  So they are literally computing and called computers.

NATHALIA HOLT:  Exactly, yes.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Before the age that we are now living in.

NATHALIA HOLT:  But then, once the first IBMs came in, then they became the first computer programmers in the lab.