Monthly Archives: March 2021

Last week, NASA accomplished a goal that reminded Americans that the future is coming fast: It landed another rover on Mars. Among billionaires and space enthusiasts, thats just the tip of the iceberg, with many of them believing the United States could send humans outside of Earths orbit again in the next 10 years if the country plays its cards right.

But outside of some government agencies or private companies that are setting their sights beyond Earth, the enthusiasm for space travel is much more grounded: Most U.S. adults dont see sending humans no matter if theyre astronauts or civilians to the moon or Mars as a high space priority, new polling data suggests. Despite this, much of the public does want the United States to maintain its global dominance in the area.

In a Morning Consult survey conducted Feb. 12-15 among 2,200 U.S. adults, 33 percent said sending human astronauts to the moon or Mars should be a top or important but lower priority for the U.S. governments space efforts about 30 percentage points lower than monitoring key parts of the Earths climate system (63 percent) or monitoring asteroids and other objects that could strike the Earths surface (62 percent).

Those priorities shed light on a larger trend among adults sentiments on space research and exploration: While a plurality (47 percent) say its essential that the United States continues to be a world leader in space exploration, few think it should be a high priority for the Biden administration and even fewer say theyd want to embark in space travel themselves, even if price werent a concern.

People have kind of generalized that, Yeah, its a good thing to do, but most people dont spend a lot of time thinking about it, said John Logsdon, the founder and former director of George Washington Universitys Space Policy Institute.

The survey has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

Investing in space research and exploration ranked 25th on a list of 26 priorities for the Biden administration that were included in the survey. Forty percent said the Biden administration should make it a top or important, but lower priority, compared with 84 percent who said the same about controlling the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and 81 percent on stimulating the economy to recover from the pandemic.

Yet the public still believes that the United States needs to keep its competitive edge in space to win out against other threats. Roughly half of adults (52 percent) said China is a major threat to the United States leadership in space research, compared with 45 percent who said the same about Russia and 34 percent about North Korea. Thirty-percent also said they viewed Iran as a major threat. Each country surveyed was included based on an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency as to who poses a threat to security in space.

When it comes to the specifics of oversight for space-related issues, though, adults were either split or at a loss. For example, when asked which agency or company is best prepared to handle sending human astronauts to the moon, adults were evenly split around 25 percent between federal space agencies, international space partnerships and having no opinion; about 1 in 5 respondents pointed to private aerospace companies.

While most people said they supported Bidens decision to keep Space Force (61 percent), the new branch of the U.S. Armed Forces established under the Trump administration, more people said they werent sure or had no opinion (23 percent) about the move than those who opposed it (15 percent). And nearly identical shares of people said Space Force should remain a military agency (33 percent) or they didnt know or had no opinion (30 percent), indicating that much of the public might not be as up to speed on the governments space efforts.

But Logsdon said space research doesnt need to be a top priority for the United States to keep its competitive edge. By his estimates, NASAs annual budget makes up less than one-half of 1 percent of the U.S. governments budget. And Congress fell just short of completely funding NASAs $25.2 billion budget request last year so it could keep an anticipated 2024 moon-landing project on schedule by instead awarding the agency with about $23.3 billion.

To get that amount of money, you dont have to be a top priority, he said.

While Logsdon says its too early to tell if the new Congress will fill the gaps left behind in the latest funding bill, the Biden administration is in the early stages of piecing together its space policies.

Earlier this month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration plans to carry on with the Artemis program, a NASA-led effort in partnership with private aerospace companies to send one man and one woman to the moon by 2024 although that timeline is being reassessed.

While Space Force lives on under Biden, questions remain about whether the administration will reinstate the National Space Council, an executive branch group overseeing space policy led by the vice president and including several cabinet secretaries and agency heads.

In the background of these government efforts is the ever-growing presence of private space companies, which dont appear to face the same budget windfalls or political concerns. Morgan Stanley estimated in July that the global space industry could generate more than $1 trillion in revenue in 2040, compared to the $350 billion estimated in 2020. Space Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on the space economy, also reported last month that investors poured $15.7 billion into 252 space companies in 2020, including $9.4 billion to U.S. companies.

That outpouring of funds is showing in private space companies more ambitious goal posts. For example, SpaceX Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk said in December that he is highly confident that his company will be able to land humans on Mars by 2026, and hes gone as far as estimating that SpaceX could send 1 million people to the Red Planet by 2050. And Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos plans to dedicate more time to his space company, Blue Origin, once he leaves his day-to-day role at the e-commerce giant later this year.

While most adults (54 percent) are bullish that humans will be able to routinely send civilians to space as tourists in the next 50 years, theyre not so sold on going into space themselves. Fifty-eight percent said they were either not too likely or not likely at all to travel to space if price werent a concern, up 10 points from the 48 percent who said the same in a September 2017 Morning Consult/Politico poll.

When asked if they would be willing to spend more or less than the price of an average airplane ticket to go to Mars, 53 percent said they were not interested at all in space travel.

Those numbers change slightly based on gender and age. More men (44 percent) said they were likely to embark in space travel if price werent a concern, than women (23 percent), while the idea of traveling to space was more popular among Gen Z (46 percent) and millennials (49 percent) compared to 32 percent of Gen X adults and 19 percent of baby boomers.

Making space exploration a priority though, even during a pandemic, could bode well for Americans morale, Logsdon said, such as what happened with the first moon landing in 1969 that came on the heels of a decade of domestic and international civil unrest.

It was a counter balance to the negativity of the time, Logsdon said. If we do inspirational things in space go back to the moon or travel beyond land rovers on Mars that gives us a sense of future, a sense of positive achievement to counter the pervasive negativity.

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Nearly Half the Public Wants the US to Maintain Its Space Dominance. Appetite for Space Exploration Is a Different Story - Morning Consult

One of the four people on board a space shuttle slated for takeoff before the end of 2021 will be pediatric cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis. The mission, Inspiration4, will be crewed entirely by non-astronauts.

Arceneaux will become the youngest Americanand the first person with prosthetic body partsto orbit Earth. In an interview with The New York Times, she said she hopes her trailblazing feat will inspire pediatric cancer patients at St. Jude and other medical centers around the world.

Theyll be able to see a cancer survivor in space, especially one that has gone through the same thing that they have, she said. Its going to help them visualize their future.

The historic opportunity comes courtesy of billionaire Jared Isaacman, who announced that he had bought the rocket launch from the space exploration company SpaceX in January. Of the four available seats, one will be filled by Isaacman, one by a frontline health care worker at St. Jude (Arceneaux), one by a donor to St. Jude and one by an entrepreneurial member of the public who wins a sweepstakes contest sponsored by Isaacmans financial software company Shift4. The donor and the sweepstakes winner have yet to be chosen, although the sweepstakes itself has ended. By the time of the launch, Isaacman hopes to have raised $200 million for St. Jude, $100 million of which is coming out of his own pocket.

I truly want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people are jumping in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the moon with their kid in a spacesuit. I also think if we are going to live in that world, we better conquer childhood cancer along the way, Isaacman told The Associated Press of his decision to marry the mission with a fundraising effort for the hospital.

Arceneaux, a Louisiana native, was chosen in January to accompany Isaacman. She was 10 in 2002, when she developed a noticeable bump on her left knee and began experiencing severe local painsymptoms that prompted her mother to seek medical attention.

Doctors at St. Jude eventually diagnosed her with bone cancer and surgically replaced her left knee and a section of her left thighbone with metal prostheses, according to the AP. While in treatment, Arceneaux attended fundraisers and won one of Louisiana Public Broadcastings Young Heroes awards. The whole experience informed her desire to pursue a career in medicine. In a video shown at the 2003 awards ceremony, she said, When I grow up, I want to be a nurse at St. Jude. I want to be a mentor to patients. When they come in, Ill say, I had that when I was little, and Im doing good.

In 2020, Arceneaux fulfilled that longtime dream when St. Jude hired her to work with children with leukemia and lymphoma. In the intervening year, her personal experience with cancer and its treatment has helped her form a rapport with the kids and teenagers under her care.

I shared with him that I also lost my hair, Arceneaux told the Times, recounting a recent encounter with a patient. I told him, You can ask me anything. Im a former patient. Ill tell you the truth, anything you want to know. And he said, Will you really tell me the truth? And I said yes.

Isaacman and Arceneaux have already paid three visits to SpaceXs headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to prepare for the launch. Per a SpaceX press release, the shuttle, Dragon, will take off from Launch Complex 39A at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida, orbit Earth every 90 minutes for three or four days and touch down off the coast of Florida.

Some studies have found that space travel comes with an increased cancer risk, but others have disputed that conclusion. For more on both sides of the debate, read Long-Term Space Travel Could Pose a Major Cancer Risk and Astronauts May Not Face Increased Risk for Cancer After All.

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Pediatric Cancer Survivor to Go on Historic Space Mission - Cancer Health Treatment News

Mars, the Red Planet, has fascinated humankind for millennia. The little world revealed more of its magic, mystery and majesty when an unmanned American spacecraft aptly named Perseverance made a gentle and on-target landing on the surface of Mars in February. Soon after the landing, Perseverance began sending back color images of the rocky Martian terrain, while a microphone on the robotic craft picked up the sounds of the wind on that tiny world. Scientists also hope to get a birds-eye view of the Martian surface by deploying a 4-pound helicopter drone called Ingenuity, carried to Mars aboard the Perseverance rover.

Ancient Romans named Mars after their god of war because of its angry reddish color. The Italian astronomer Galileo first viewed the planet by telescope around 1610. Interest in the Red Planet peaked in the late 19th Century when a wealthy American named Percival Lowell built an observatory in Arizona dedicated to the study of Mars in an effort to discover signs of intelligent life there. In his book Mars as the Abode of Life, Lowell voiced his belief that Mars could be the home of an ancient and advanced civilization. In 1898, author H.G. Wells penned War of the Worlds, a fanciful account of an invasion of Earth by beings from Mars. Forty years later, in 1938, thousands of Americans were frightened by a radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in the form of a breaking news story.

Science fiction magazines and stories like pioneering sci-fi writer Stanley Weinbaums 1934 publication of A Martian Odyssey kept Mars on the minds of Earthlings during the frightening times of the Great Depression and World War II. In the postwar 1950s, movies and television shows often featured monsters from Mars, but audiences also viewed a realistic depiction of astronauts voyaging to the Red Planet when Walt Disney aired a TV show called Mars and Beyond in December 1957just two months after the Space Age began with the Soviet Unions Earth-orbiting Sputnik satellite.

By the 1960s, both the United States and the Soviet Union had attempted without success to send robotic spacecraft to Mars. Not until 1965 would Mars reveal some of its secrets when Americas tiny 575-pound probe, Mariner IV, flew past the planet and beamed back 22 grainy black-and-white photos of its cratered surface. In the decades that followed, other unmanned spacecraft from the United States and other countries would explore Mars, including two successful Viking landers that touched down on the planet in 1976 and a series of NASA rovers that have roamed the Martian landscape since the 1990s. Perseverance and Ingenuity are just the latest in a long line of Earths electronic emissaries to our neighboring world.

As humans explore Mars close up with color and sound, Ray Bradbury must be smiling in his grave. The beloved writer, who died in 2012 at the age of 91, brought fright and delight to millions with such works as Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes. He brought Mars down to Earth in the years after World War II with his publication of The Martian Chronicles, a series of stories about human flight to Mars. Space travel will be just as silly, sad, exciting and wonderful as any other great human adventure, said Bradbury.

Scientists recognized Bradburys influence when spacecraft began to show the first clear views of the planet he had described in fiction. Bradbury was invited to the California control room during Mars missions in 1971 and 1976, and a digital copy of his Martian Chronicles was carried to the planets surface aboard a NASA lander in 2007. Another Mars landing site was named Bradbury Landing a few weeks after the writers 2012 death.

Humans need a sense of beauty and wonder here on an Earth so often despoiled by human folly. Missions to Mars show that Bradbury was right when he said, If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.

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Mars Rover Perseverance Illustrates the Wonders of Space | Flagpole - Flagpole Magazine

After traveling to all 193 United Nation-recognized countries, UNC professor Jim Kitchen has his sights set on the final frontier space.

Kitchens journey to all the countries in the world began over 30 years ago, when started his travel business as a student at UNC in Chapel Hill.

I never said no to a trip that came across my desk, Kitchen told 97.9 The Hills Aaron Keck.

His job took him all over the world and Kitchen said when he finally sat down to look at a map, he had about 100 countries left to travel to. The next years were spent completing the map, traveling to a half-dozen countries at a time. His journey was finally completed in 2019 when Kitchen traveled to Syria.

I had planned to finish it somewhere glamorous or somewhere where the family and friends could go and celebrate, but it ended up being in Syria when Lebanon was in full revolution. So it was a fitting end to that global expedition.

With all 193 countries down, Kitchen has his sights set on space through the Inspiration 4 Contest.

The contest was started by Jared Isaacman billionare and CEO for the payment processor company Shift4 Payment and will send four private citizens to low-Earth orbit via a SpaceX flight. Two of the four crew have been chosen: Isaacman and29-year-oldphysician Hayley Arceneaux.

The final two seats on the trip have yet to be selected. One of the seats will be chosen via social media the category that Kitchen is vying for.

For Kitchen, a trip to space would complete the journey he began years ago at UNC.

Funny enough, my junior year in college prior to starting my travel business, I met a guy that was selling space travel, he said. So I flew out to Seattle, Washington, met with him, and I started selling his trips called Project Space Voyage back in 1985. So I began my entrepreneurial journey selling space travel, started this travel business, went to every country, and now my dream is to see it all from space.

In addition to his potential journey to space, Kitchen is publishing a book that details the lessons hes learned from his years of travel. Kitchen said he never planned to publish A Bigger World, but found time during the pandemic to organize all of his notes.

During the pandemic, I had all of these lessons that I had learned along the way and I began organizing them into this book. Really, the story is about a guy trying to figure his life out.

Want to help Kitchen get to space? Hes competing against some of the biggest influencers on social media and needs retweets on his tweet (posted above). Liking and retweeting Kitchens post goes a long way in helping him get to space.

The odds are stacked against me, Kitchen said, but Im optimistic that maybe the story will shine through.

Jim Kitchen is a co-owner of Chapel Hill Media Group, which owns 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.

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UNC Professor Jim Kitchen Aims to Get to Space. Here's How You Can Help - Chapelboro.com

LOS ANGELES, CA, March 02, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NewMediaWire -- US Nuclear (OTCQB: UCLE) and MIFTIs fusion power generator would be ideal to power spaceship propulsion, as its nuclear fusion power uses a lightweight, safe, and low-cost fuel, generating four times as much energy as nuclear fission, and 10,000,000 times as much as chemical rocket fuels.

On February 18, 2021, NASAs advanced Perseverance rover touched down on Mars and is now seeking evidence of native life on the red planet. Sooner than you think, human engineers and adventurers may be building the first town on Mars. While we have made great strides in robotics technology, the next step in the journey is sending humans to Mars. In order to send a crewed mission to Mars, NASA is focusing on nuclear electric or nuclear thermal propulsion systems for minimizing the time and fuel it takes to travel to Mars and back.

Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASAs Space Technology Mission Directorate, said NASA is investing in technologies that could enable crewed missions to Mars, and looks forward to seeing what innovations industry offer in nuclear propulsion. NASA released a solicitation on February 12, 2021 asking the industry for preliminary reactor design concepts for a nuclear thermal propulsion system. Technology development has already begun for sending a crewed mission to Mars as early as the 2030s.

Nuclear power propulsion would allow the crewed mission to be completed with much less fuel and in a shorter time frame. NASA said that to keep the round-trip crewed mission duration to about two years, at a minimum, NASA is looking at nuclear-enabled transportation systems to facilitate shorter-stay surface missions. Nuclear fuels and power systems, such as the MIFTI fusion power generator, can deliver 10,000,000 times the work (or energy) per payload pound than the chemical rocket fuels traditionally used.

Nuclear fusion can be used for both thermal nuclear propulsion and electric nuclear propulsion, and it is estimated that it would only take 3 months to reach Mars using a fusion powered propulsion system. In addition, the fuel for fusion power can be generated anywhere there is water or ice, and unlike fission, is not dependent on the ready supply of enriched Uranium. Thermal nuclear propulsion gives high thrust and is especially important to shorten flight time for nearby missions to Venus, Mars, and the inner asteroid belt. Electric nuclear propulsion is high efficiency but lower thrust, and can give continuous acceleration for many years without refueling, thus building up to incredible speeds for trips to Jupiter, Pluto, and even to other stars.

NASA goes on to say that nuclear propulsion can enable robust and efficient exploration beyond the Moon and it will continue to develop, test, and mature various propulsion technologies. US Nuclear and MIFTI are just a few years away from building the worlds first fusion power generator which could later be used to power space travel.

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/nuclear-propulsion-could-help-get-humans-to-mars-faster

Safe Harbor ActThis press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from expectations, estimates and projections and, consequently, you should not rely on these forward looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as "expect," "estimate," "project," "budget," "forecast," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "may," "will," "could," "should," "believes," "predicts," "potential," "continue," and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from the expected results.

Investors may find additional information regarding US Nuclear Corp. at the SEC website at http://www.sec.gov, or the companys website at http://www.usnuclearcorp.com

CONTACT:

US Nuclear Corp. (OTCQB: UCLE)

Robert I. Goldstein, President, CEO, and Chairman

Rachel Boulds, Chief Financial Officer

(818) 883 7043

Email: info@usnuclearcorp.com

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Think About Taking Your First US Nuclear Fusion Powered Trip to Mars and Back - GlobeNewswire

Why do the worlds two richest men want to get off the planet so badly?

Elon Musk of Tesla and Jeff Bezos of Amazon have more than $350 billion in combined wealth and preside over two of the most valuable companies ever created. But when theyre not innovating on Earth, they have been focusing their considerable brain power on bringing a multiplanetary human habitat to reality.

For Mr. Musk, its through his other company, SpaceX, which has become an ever bigger player in the private space-technology arena. On top of satellite launches and other rocket innovations, the company announced it will send its first all civilian crew into orbit at the end of the year, in a mission called Inspiration4. SpaceX has already carried NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and is planning to transport more, as well as private astronauts, for a high price.

Most ambitiously, Mr. Musk has said that SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026. To do that, the private company will use a chunk of the close to $3 billion including $850 million announced this week in a regulatory filing that it has raised over the last year to finance this herculean effort.

While Mr. Musk might not be the first human to go to the red planet, he once told me that he wanted to die there, joking, Just not on landing.

Mr. Bezos, who is stepping down as chief executive of Amazon this year, is expected to accelerate his space-travel efforts through his company Blue Origin, whose tag line reads, in part, Earth, in all its beauty, is just our starting place.

Mr. Bezos most extravagant notion, unveiled in 2019, is a vision of space colonies spinning cylinders floating out there with all kinds of environments.

These are very large structures, miles on end, and they hold a million people or more each, he said, noting they are intended to relieve the stress on Earth and help make it more livable.

Musk has said that SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026.

The two NASA missions delivered this week the kind of awe-inspiring moments that make one look up from the wretched news spewing out of our smartphones toward the stunning celestial beauty of the endless universe.

The first was the batch of images from amazing high-definition cameras on the Perseverance rover, a car-size autonomous vehicle that touched down in the Jezero Crater on Mars last week. The photographs are so sharp that you can zoom in close enough to look at the holes in the rocks on the surface and even get a pretty good sense of the dirt itself. The larger panorama is just as arresting, a desert scene that is breathtakingly alien while also feeling quite familiar.

I found myself staring at the scenes for an hour, marveling that I can see the details of an elegant wind-carved boulder from a distance of 133.6 million miles. The $2.7 billion Mars mission includes a search for signs of ancient Martian life, sample-collecting and the flight of a helicopter called Ingenuity.

But the imagery from Mars was quickly topped by an even older NASA mission to Jupiter by the Juno space probe, which entered the planets orbit in 2016. It did some very close fly-bys recently that are yielding perhaps the most stunning photos that weve ever seen of the planet.

Color-enhanced by citizen scientists from publicly available NASA data and images, the images show delicately swirling jet streams that look like a painting of quicksilver created by some space-faring artistic genius. I wish I could be riding on Juno myself to see up close the vast cyclones gather and the angry clouds seethe.

It was just a year ago that Juno sent back another image of Jupiter, looking like the best marble ever made, which NASA titled Massive Beauty.

Perhaps the fact that life on Earth feels so precarious at this moment explains, at least in part, why Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk want to find ways to get off it.

But its important to keep in mind that these two men are just two voices among billions of earthlings. It is incumbent on the rest of us to take more control of how we are going to move into the brave new worlds beyond our own gem of a planet.

We have handed over so much of our fate to so few people over the last decades, especially when it comes to critical technology. As we take tentative steps toward leaving Earth, it feels like we are continuing to place too much of our trust in the hands of tech titans.

Think about it: We the people invented the internet, and the tech moguls pretty much own it. And we the people invented space travel, and it now looks as if the moguls could own that, too.

Lets hope not. NASA, and other government space agencies around the world, need our continued support to increase space exploration.

I get that we have enormous needs on this planet, and money put toward space travel could instead be spent on improving lives here on Earth. But the risk to our planet from climate change means we have to think much bigger.

Keep in mind a hidden message that NASA engineers put onto the descent parachute of the Perseverance rover. The colors on the chute were a binary code that translates into Dare mighty things.

Coming from across the vast and empty universe, it was a message not meant just for Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk. It was actually meant for all of us.

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Why are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the world's richest men, so interested in space? - Economic Times

TAHLEQUAH In 1958, a Cherokee woman from Los Altos, California, appeared on the television game show Whats My Line and stumped panelists who attempted to guess her occupation. They wondered what relation she had to rockets and missiles.

Mary Golda Ross became a national icon for Cherokees and women for her work as the first Native American aerospace engineer.

Ross was born in 1908 in Park Hill, and is the great-great granddaughter of Principal Chief John Ross. At 16, she was enrolled at Northeastern State Teachers College in Tahlequah. She graduated in 1928 with a mathematics degree and later taught math and science for a few years, according a National Museum of the American Indian Newservice article.

In 1938, she earned her masters degree in mathematics at the University of Northern Colorado, according to an Engineer Extraordinaire profile. At the same time, she was working as a girls advisor at a boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

While earning her masters degree, Ross studied the stars in astronomy classes, and in 1942, she put her skills to work and answered the call for a mathematician at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in California in the midst of World War II, according to the NMAI.

At Lockheed, Ross started out consulting on projects for a new type of airplane called the P-38 Lightning fighter plane. As the war progressed and ended, Ross was asked to stay on as an engineer, taking extension courses at the University of California-Los Angeles to earn a professional certification in engineering, and studied mathematics for modern engineering, aeronautics and missile and celestial mechanics, according to the NMAI.

When the space race began, Ross became the first woman engineer among a team of 40 engineers to work in the top-secret Lockheed Skunk Works program in 1952.

It was this missiles system groups research that led to preliminary design concepts of interplanetary space travel, manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights, and other state of the advances in aerospace development, states a Society of Women Engineers biography.

In a Lockheed recruitment campaign, her work was described as crucial to the Agena rocket project.

She established major technical and operational requirements, providing data critical to the spaceships design. The versatile Agena recorded a number of space flight firsts, and was an essential step in the Apollo program to land on the moon. It marked a critical leap for Americas space program. And for that, Lockheed and the nation owe much to Mary Ross and her fellow engineers, states a former Lockheed campaign.

Ross retired from Lockheed in 1973 and continued to be an inspiration even after her death in 2008, just a few months shy of her 100th birthday.

Mary Golda Ross embodies what our Cherokee people and culture are known for using your gifts and education in service to others, Cherokee author Traci Sorell said. She took her whole self into spaces occupied primarily by white men at the time transformed them. She paved the way for so many women and Native people in STEM fields because of that.

Sorell was inspired to write a book on Ross and her many achievements, weaving Cherokee values into the written biography.

If you read Marys last interviewshe refers to those values, her education and her aptitude in math as the reasons for her success as an aerospace engineer, Sorell said. Aerospace engineering wasnt even a major in college at the time. It was a developing field, and Mary was right there in the middle of all the groundbreaking work being done. I love that and find it so incredible.

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Mary Golda Ross: Mathematician, engineer and inspiration | Education | cherokeephoenix.org - Cherokee Phoenix

NASAs mathematician Katherine Johnson is one of the nations hidden treasures as are so many in the Black community.

READ MORE: Eye on Film: Taraji P. Henson And Octavia Spencer Talk Hidden Figures

She made history as one of the first Black women to work as a NASA scientist. Johnson was brilliant as it pertained to numbers and formulas and in 1961 she put the calculations together that enabled astronauts to go into space.

For better than 30 years, she used her math capabilities to transform the possibilities of space travel.

As a tribute to her meticulous and downright breathtaking work, a space station supply ship named after her launched into the International Space Station on February 20th, celebrating the 59th anniversary of John Glenns historic orbit around the Earth.

Johnsons role in this endeavor was crucial as she verified the numbers needed to make a launch possible. Its safe to say her numbers were pretty accurate.

Its our tradition to name each Cygnus after an individual whos played a pivotal role in human space flight, and Ms. Johnson was selected for her hand-written calculations that helped launch the first Americans into space, as well as her accomplishments in breaking the proverbial glass ceiling after glass ceiling as a Black woman said Frank DeMauro, Vice President and General Manager at Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman named the NG-15 Cygnus spacecraft, the S.S. Katherine Johnson, in celebration of Black History Month.

RELATED: Eye on Film: Hidden Figures Producer Pharrell Williams

Johnson was born August 26, 2018, in White Sulphuric Springs, West Virginia. She displayed an incredible math skillset at a young age, which allowed her to take an ax Leto oath in her academic studies. She even enrolled in college early and took every math course available to her, while also receiving mentorship from multiple professors. NASA even says she was mentored by the third Black person to earn a Ph. D. in mathematics, professor W.W. Schiefellin Claytor.

In 1937, she graduated with a bachelors degree in Mathematics and French. She was just 18-years-old. Upon graduation, she followed in her mentors footsteps as a teacher. She landed a job as a teacher at a Black public school in Virginia. She then became the first Black woman to attend graduate school at West Virginia University in Morgantown.

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) hired Johnson as a research mathematician in 1953. That organization became NASA in 1958. Her work was instrumental in Alan Shepards mission Freedom 7, John Glenns orbital mission, and Apollo 11s flight to the moon.

In 2015 President Obama awarded Johnson the countrys highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal Of Freedom. In 2016, the Hollywood film Hidden Figures her contributions as a NASA mathematician. Taraji P. Henson played the lead role of Katherine Johnson.

READ MORE: TSL Black History Month in Focus: Hidden Figures

Johnson passed on February 24, 2020, at age 101. She left the world with several quotes that highlight the keys to success and significance. We always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engine and technology. And above all, there will always be mathematics.

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Space Shuttle Named After Hidden Figures Mathematician - The Shadow League

On Thursday 18th February, the world held its breath as NASAs science rover Perseverance made its perilous descent onto the Martian surface. After over seven months of flight, the rover, alongside the small robotic helicopter Ingenuity, successfully landed on Mars and began its mission to study the planets habitability. This spectacular achievement sparked a worldwide interest in space exploration and the opportunities for humans, with the topic trending across the internet. Now it begs the obvious question: what comes next?

Humans have been trying to understand space for millennia, and whilst the concept of dark matter and energy still present a great deal of unknowns, weve come an exceptionally long way. Against all odds, the Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin made humanitys space debut in 1961, and the decade became even more exciting when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon in 1969. Although humans have not been to the dusty surface, or anywhere beyond the outskirts of the Earth, since 1972, hope is not yet lost.

Now, billionaire entrepreneurs like Elon Musk bring forth the promise of rockets fit for human travel, and the SpaceX CEO has said he is highly confident that the company will have humans on the Red Planet by 2026. Speaking at an award show webcast in 2020, Musk expressed his hopes for the projects future: if we get lucky, maybe even four years. SpaceX faces competition however, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Virgin boss Richard Branson also vying to make space the next business frontier, in what has been coined the billionaire space race.

The promise of commercial space continues to grow, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos partnership with Space Adventures to create a new tourist destination aboard the International Space Station (ISS). In a statement about the contract, Space Adventures CEO and Chairman, Eric Anderson, stated we look forward to continuing to work with Roscosmos in the pursuit of opening the space frontier for all. Russias grand scheme to return into the space tourism business also offers a $40 million, five-star orbital experience with a dizzying view of the Earth from the ISS, providing the epitome of a luxury holiday.

Though sending humans to space remains an intriguing prospect, the importance of exploratory rovers is forever increasing. NASAs Perseverance, alongside its study of Mars, is also equipped to collect rock and soil samples, and there is potential to return these samples to Earth for further analysis something that has never been done in the history of space exploration. The European Space Agency also has big plans: the JUICE Explorer is set to launch in 2022, on a mission to explore three moons of Jupiter, as well as the Gas Giant itself.

Aditi Hrisheekesh, an avid space enthusiast, voiced her anticipation about upcoming space missions. Theres so much out there that we didnt think wed be able to see and experience, but its really exciting about how now theres the possibility of exploring and maybe inhabiting these planets. She went on to say how it was mesmerising to look at photos from space and learn about the fascinating discoveries made by scientists.

Whilst these views are echoed by people around the world, the future of space travel is not quite so rose-tinted. The costs associated with these expeditions are astronomical (no pun intended!) and oftentimes the funds granted by governments cannot support the aspirations of space agencies. Perhaps this is the reason why the international space stage is becoming slowly dominated by billionaire-owned companies like SpaceX.

Financial problems are not the only ones on the list; many in the space flight community believe we shouldnt begin the countdown to Mars before we make it to the Moon again. They say it is only logical to ensure we have the technology and competencies for further deep space missions and that a research station on the Moon is a beneficial next step in our exploration of space. NASAs announcement of plans to send the first woman and next man back to the moon by 2024 may mean that this goal, and all future ones, arent so out of reach.

The prospects for space travel certainly are exhilarating and with the eyes of the world on space agencies, the anticipation is tangible. Perhaps in the future, space flights will be the norm, with the possibility of a Martian holiday on the horizon, but only time will tell.

Article by Aashi Shah

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Space: what comes next? by Aashi Shah, The Henrietta Barnett School - This is Local London