space history
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NASA Sold An Original Moon Landing Video To An Intern In The 1970s And Now It’s For Sale Again
Later this month, some of the original videotapes that captured the first Moon landing will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But they’re not being sold by NASA. Incredibly, these tapes were sold to a random NASA intern back in the 1970s who had no idea at the time that he’d purchased an important…
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Here Are The Jobs NASA Can’t Fill Because Of Trump’s Hiring Freeze
One of President Trump’s first actions after taking office was to institute a federal hiring freeze, leaving thousands of jobs vacant across the US government. Many of these jobs are in agencies that Trump supposedly values, like NASA. But when you look at the job vacancies that NASA is forbidden from filling, we see Trump’s…
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A Solar Flare Almost Caused Nuclear War In 1967
On 23 May 1967, the United States Air Force scrambled to ready nuclear missile-laden aircraft for deployment. Radar systems designed to detect incoming Soviet missiles had just been disrupted, in what the military perceived to be an act of war. But before any nukes were launched in retaliation, it seems Air Force command was told…
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What China’s Yutu Rover Learned On The Moon
A team of scientists has finished analysing rocks collected by the Chinese lunar rover Yutu in 2013 — the first geologic sampling effort to hit the Moon in forty years. The regolith is unlike any we’ve seen before, and it suggests that the Moon’s history is far more complex than we realised.