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When he became the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn gave the United States a boost in the space race, making him one of the most famous Americans alive.

Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson were brilliant women who used their mathematical abilities to help send rockets (manned and unmanned) into space. Want to know more about them? Don’t watch the film, Hidden Figures. Though Hidden Figures is an entertaining movie, it does what most bio-pics (biographical movies) do: warps time and truth […]

Laika, a Moscow street dog, became the first creature to orbit Earth, but she died in space.

Moonshot management s+b Blogs Today’s leaders can learn valuable lessons from James Webb, the NASA administrator who met John F. Kennedy’s lunar challenge. Photograph by Jeremy Horner NASA has set its sights on Mars. In April, the space agency flew a solar-powered drone on the red planet — the first powered flight on another world. A month earlier, it successfully fired up the four engines of its most powerful rocket since the Apollo era. If the funding and political will can be sustained, this will be the rocket that lifts humans to Mars. James Edwin Webb would surely be delighted.

Sixty years ago, on May 5, 1961, a Redstone rocket hurled Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule, Freedom 7, 116 miles (187 km) high and 302 miles (486 km) downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Freedom 7 parachuted into the Atlantic just 15 minutes and 22 seconds later, after attaining a maximum velocity of 5,180 mph (8,336 km/h). Shepard, a Navy test pilot and NASA astronaut, became the first American to fly in space. Shepard’s flight was a triumph, not least because it had been conducted live on national television and in front of the world press. It was a notable contrast to the secretive ...