20 shocking facts about NASA you have never heard before

March 21, 2016 Gossips,World Facts

NASA, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an American space agency was created by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial satellite the previous year. It has the world’s largest budget for space exploration, so let’s look at some shocking facts about NASA  you have never heard before.

1.NASA can pay you to lay in bed for months at a time so they can study the effects of prolonged weightlessness.NASA is also conducting a series of ‘Rest Studies’ where the they want volunteers who can stay in bed for 70 days and smoke different kinds of cannabis. At the end,  the smokers will get $18,000  i.e. about Rs. 12.25 lakhs.

2.NASA is actually working on designing a sci-fi inspired idea, Star Trek-style warp drive looking at the feasibility of bending space-time.

3.NASA has its own radio station  which plays Rock/ Indie music along with NASA’s  news  and updates.

4.NASA was sued by three men from Yemen for invading on Mars as they asserted that they had inherited the planet 3000 years ago from their ancestors which were based on the mythologies of Himyaritic and Sabaean.

5.Just in case life is found on some other planet, NASA  has developed an  Office of Planetary Protection.

6.The Vehicle Assembly Building is so big that it has its own weather.It needs 10,000 tons of Air Conditioning equipment   so the Florida humidity would not cause rain clouds to form near the ceiling.

7.Gregory Nemitz and his company Orbital Development apparently claimed ownership of asteroid 433 Eros. When NASA’s spaceship ‘NEAR Shoemaker’ landed on the asteroid in 2001 and  subsequently they issued NASA a parking ticket for $20.

8.In 1991, NASA’s Spacewatch discovered a small body near the earth as a possible alien probe which will be back to earth somewhere around 2016  which is now listed in their Astrophysics Data System.

9.NASA is providing a free message service whenever the International Space Station passes over you, they will send you a text message.

10.As part of its staff training, NASA often shows the movie Armageddon find out as many scientific inaccuracies as they can which is about 168.

11.According to polls conducted in 1997, most Americans think that NASA funding is about  20% of the national budget. In reality, NASA receives $0.005 cents of every dollar.

12.In 2009, NASA had sent a machine called ARCADE which picked up the huge amount of radio noise in deep space which was six  times louder than anything they had  expected. Since then they call it Space Roar.

13.You have to  travel at least 50 miles above the surface of the earth to be considered an astronaut by NASA.

14.In 1979, Skylab upon reentry to earth got crashed and landed at Esperance in Austrailia.Shire issued a fine of $400 on NASA for littering into their space. It was just recently paid.

15.In 1999, NASA lost an orbiter because of the small mistake as the half of the engineers were using imperial measurements and the other half were using metric measurements.

16.In 2006, NASA admitted that they do not have any tape of moon landing as they have accidentally recorded over the original tapes. Fortunately, they found copies at CBS and Johnson Space Center which are currently being restored.

17.The Space Shuttle electronics are very outdated and nobody makes  them anymore, so NASA has even resorted to buying spare parts on websites like eBay.

18.NASA’s goal is to have humans on Mars by some point in the 2030s.

19.It is a myth that NASA has spent millions of dollars to produce  a space pen while soviet astronauts simply used a pencil when actually space pen was produced independently by Fisher without any government funding.Eventually, NASA bought approximately 400 pens at $6 a piece.

20.In 2008, NASA -Speedo partnership has created a swimsuit to reduce the skin friction drag by covering most part of the body. It was so successful that swimmers were banned from using it in competitions. NASA has also invented invisible braces, scratch free glasses and some other things which we can use.