From the article:

First flower ever grown in space bloomed today!

Yay!

Happy birthday, space flower!

(source: gilderoys)

KIRK IS HOLDING A ZINNIA. THE SAME FUCKING FLOWER.

FUCKING NASA MAN

No. Nononono. You don’t understand. 

I am so mad about this. Like, not like I wanna kill someone, but mad, as in, hysterical?

They wanted to answer questions about plants in space, right? How biology and botany would work in space. Because then who knows? We could grow crops in space, or fix the atmosphere. Or create the perfect biome for plants that are now extinct. Who fucking knows, right?

They could have taken a food crop. Wheat, maybe. Or rice. Something they could observe to see if it would be possible to solve a food shortage or whatever. Maybe a small apple tree to see if it would bloom, and then see if there could be a way to make it fruit. 

Or, you know, go the genetics route and take a sweet pea. See if zero gravity does anything to how genes are passed on. Mendel did it in a shed, why not a tin shed in outer space, right? Oh the possibilities.

Was it so wrong to take the zinnia? No, of course not. In my little horticultural brain, I thought, oh how lovely! A splash of colour in the emptiness of space. Something bright and cheerful, something that gives hope. That must have been it, right? 

But no. 

SOMEONE went, “Nah, mate, here’s an episode of Star Trek where Kirk is holding a ZINNIA in a SPACE DESERT.”

I could scream. I don’t know if I love or hate these fucking nerds. Oh my gods. 

NASA, YOU NEEEEERDS

love these NASA nerds 

space shit is cancelled until we solve homelessness and poverty

I mean, the military budget of the USA is around 824.6 billion. 

NASA’s budget is only 18-19 billion

It’s estimated that to end extreme poverty would take 175 billion dollars

Clearly, it’s space stuff that’s taking up all money that could otherwise go to help people. 

This is not a Van Gogh painting, you’re looking at a color-enhanced image of a massive, raging storm in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere. This spectacular image was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during its ninth close flyby about 6,281 miles from the tops of the clouds of Jupiter.

(Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/ Seán Doran)

out of this world trolling lmao

For bonus context, the actual quote they’re citing for this protest comes from Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016), who flew in Apollo 14 and was the sixth person to walk on the Moon.

The full quotation, referring to the experience of observing Earth from the Moon surface, is thus:

#WE’VE DONE IT BOYS#WE’VE PUT SALT IN SPACE

slides nasa $10 so, tell me about the aliens

Slides the aliens $20 so, tell me about NASA

aliens slide nasa $50 so, Shh

NASA(crying): we finally have enough money for rockets

The women of NASA

Very important to see and share…

Respect

look at all those scientists

This is Kjell Lindgren. He’s a NASA astronaut who just got back from 5 months on the International Space Station. There are two reasons why this picture is hilarious:

 tl;dr NASA employs a bunch of fucking nerds

It gets better.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here’s the poster NASA released for his mission to the ISS:

NASA confirmed for a bunch of fucking nerds

*wipes single tear*

They’re just too beautiful.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. 

NASA personnel are, like, the top nerds. The alpha nerds. The absolute nerdiest nerds. The nerds other nerds look to for nerdspiration. 

Even better. My ex husband worked at NASA. And all their computers and servers had names. Every time they made a new server for a new project, they’d all have a meeting and go, “Okay we need an acronym for this project/sever. It has to be nerdy.” And they would twist around all the words in ridiculous ways until they ended up with stuff like TARDIS and SHIELD and stuff. For their official projects.

This is Kjell Lindgren. He’s a NASA astronaut who just got back from 5 months on the International Space Station. There are two reasons why this picture is hilarious:

 tl;dr NASA employs a bunch of fucking nerds

It gets better.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here’s the poster NASA released for his mission to the ISS:

NASA confirmed for a bunch of fucking nerds

*wipes single tear*

They’re just too beautiful.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. 

NASA personnel are, like, the top nerds. The alpha nerds. The absolute nerdiest nerds. The nerds other nerds look to for nerdspiration. 

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016)

“Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Originally relegated to teaching math in the South’s segregated public schools, they were called into service during the labor shortages of World War II, when America’s aeronautics industry was in dire need of anyone who had the right stuff. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had a shot at jobs worthy of their skills, and they answered Uncle Sam’s call, moving to Hampton, Virginia and the fascinating, high-energy world of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

Even as Virginia’s Jim Crow laws required them to be segregated from their white counterparts, the women of Langley’s all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve one of the things it desired most: a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and complete domination of the heavens.

Starting in World War II and moving through to the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race, Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future.”

by Margot Lee Shetterly

Order it here

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aww nasa has a page for space technology terms you can use in science fiction

nerds

THIS IS THE BEST THING

AAAAAAHHH

Holy crap!!

yall

just a reminder that hidden figures is a dramatization of the plight of black women working in NASA during the segregation era usa and that the scene where taraji had to run almost half a mile just to use the colored restroom DID NOT happened in real life as told by the real Katherine Johnson herself.  

She simply just used the “white restroom” instead of the white man coming over to the west wing to “destroy and end segregation” quite literally when he used a pry bar to “dismantle” the colored sign on top of the restroom. In reality, Katherine simply used the unlabeled bathroom at Langley and when confronted about it, she simply ignored them racists ass and continued on her merry way.

Don’t let Hollywood’s romanticized trope of the white man savior sensitize your perception to the truth and erase the real stories and struggles of Katherine Johnson and all the other colored people had to go through during that time. This link serves as a good starting point in sifting out the truth from the fiction. stay woke

This country as a concept and a nation can kiss my ass but it has some good people that it doesn’t deserve and I’m glad they exist.

I’m serious

Okay so this is one of the WEIRDEST FUCKING THINGS humanity has stumbled upon in science and it gives me a nerd boner that can be seen from Alpha Centauri.

mark my words this fucking thing is going to REVOLUTIONIZE the design of satellites and scientific probes

and just think of the potential it might have if its thrust increases proportionately to the power fed into it

THIS IS FUKCIN HUGE MY DUDES

Reblogging this just to restate how fucking huge this is.

Imagine you blow air into a balloon and tie it off. Then when you untie it, you let the balloon go and it flies all over the place. This is how propulsion works. This is what Newton’s Third Law is based on. That the air is coming out and pushing the balloon forward.

The EM drive is moving forward when the balloon is still tied off at the end.

I heard about this theorized not some time ago and thought it was amazing!

The fact that it’s been thoroughly peer-reviewed and still stands up is nothing short of absolutely astounding.

This device works, and no one is quite sure how or WHY it does. It defies our current understanding of why physics work the way the way they do. Which mean basically means that we need to re-evaluate and refine our laws of physics because we have discovered empirical evidence that we’ve got something wrong. And trying to fix our math to accurately describe the universe is going lead to new discoveries about the fundamental nature of reality. IT’S MIND BLOWING.

Not to mention this device itself, if we can elaborate and expand on it, will change how we do propulsion. This might the next stage of propulsion technology. To the people a few decades in the future, combustion engine propulsion technology will seem as silly, outdated, and quaint as steam propulsion or horse-drawn carriages seem to us.

THE FUTURE APPROACHES.

god I’m such a nerd

This is hugely important stuff. A lot of reports on this thing talk about how it “breaks the laws of physics,” but this is an inaccurate oversimplification. The reality of it is much more profound. If this thing indeed works, and the results we’ve gotten thus far can’t be explained by some sort of experimental error, it will redefine our understanding of physics. In other words, the laws of physics aren’t being “broken,” we’ve just been wrong about physics the entire time.

@izzymar !

On her childhood:

“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”

On her NASA calculations:

“Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, ‘Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”

Katherine really stood out in her field because she was the only woman who asked questions.

“The women did what they were told to do,” she explained. “They didn’t ask questions or take the task any further. I asked questions; I wanted to know why.“

In 2011, when asked if she still counts things:

 “Oh, yes. And things have to be parallel. I see a picture right now that’s not parallel, so I’m going to go straighten it. Things must be in order.”

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