mydotsocial: NASA, Tor/Forge Books Team Up to Develop Series of Sci-Fi Novels In an attempt to hook kids on science and math, NASA and Tor/Forge Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, have teamed up to develop “NASA Inspired Works of Fiction,” a series of sci-fi novels based on past, present, and future NASA projects. More info here. Attention, Matt Mira. You, too, fatstronaut.
Pop-upView Separately

mydotsocial:

NASA, Tor/Forge Books Team Up to Develop Series of Sci-Fi Novels

In an attempt to hook kids on science and math, NASA and Tor/Forge Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, have teamed up to develop “NASA Inspired Works of Fiction,” a series of sci-fi novels based on past, present, and future NASA projects.

More info here.

Attention, Matt Mira. You, too, fatstronaut.

inothernews: Four NASA astronauts from the final space shuttle mission tonight presented host Stephen Colbert with a pretty fucking cool artifact — a “frangible nut.”  As Commander Chris Ferguson explained, The space shuttle is actually held to the launch pad with eight very large nuts. …At the moment that the solid rocket boosters — the big  white ones — fire, there’s charges in either side of that nut that will split that nut in half and actually release the space shuttle from the state of Florida (!!!) so that it may ascend in(to) orbit. Stephen then snarked, “As if launching a rocket were not phallic enough, you literally bust a nut when you go into space.” Learn something new every day!  Also, may your nuts never be frangible. I think I have a new wedding toast standby.
Pop-upView Separately

inothernews:

Four NASA astronauts from the final space shuttle mission tonight presented host Stephen Colbert with a pretty fucking cool artifact — a “frangible nut.”  As Commander Chris Ferguson explained,

The space shuttle is actually held to the launch pad with eight very large nuts. …At the moment that the solid rocket boosters — the big  white ones — fire, there’s charges in either side of that nut that will split that nut in half and actually release the space shuttle from the state of Florida (!!!) so that it may ascend in(to) orbit.

Stephen then snarked, “As if launching a rocket were not phallic enough, you literally bust a nut when you go into space.”

Learn something new every day!  Also, may your nuts never be frangible.

I think I have a new wedding toast standby.

First of all, let’s clarify what the NASA budget is. Do you realize that the $850 billion dollar bailout, that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of NASA?

And so when someone says, “We don’t have enough money for this space probe,” I’m asking, no, it’s not that you don’t have enough money, it’s that the distribution of money that you’re spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about tomorrow.

You remember the 60s and 70s. You didn’t have to go more than a week before there’s an article in Life magazine, “The Home of Tomorrow,” “The City of Tomorrow,” “Transportation of Tomorrow”. All of that ended in the 1970s. After we stopped going to the Moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.

And so I worry that the decision that Congress makes doesn’t factor in the consequences of those decisions on tomorrow. Tomorrow’s gone. They’re playing for the quarterly report, they’re playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation, and the rest of the world is going to pass us by.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (via david)

This is brilliant and sad. It’s the end of dreams time.

(via discoverynews)

(via discoverynews)

Source: kateoplis