A Note From Bob
The day the space race got a mailing address
Wednesday. On this date in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, and nine weeks later a brand-new civilian agency opened for business with roughly eight thousand people inherited from the old NACA and instructions written into the law itself: the work would be for peaceful purposes, for the benefit of all mankind, and it would be done in public. Sputnik had been overhead for less than a year. Eleven years after that signature, two Americans were walking on the Moon. Today we hand you fifteen questions on it. NASA and the Space Age is today's featured quiz. Pour the coffee.
Trivia Question of the Day
America's answer to Sputnik, Explorer 1, weighed barely thirty pounds. It still made the first great scientific discovery of the space age. What did it find?
The answer is at the bottom of this email.
Today's Featured Quiz
NASA and the Space Age
It began as a scramble. A beeping Soviet sphere, a congressional panic, a rocket that blew up on the pad in front of the newsreel cameras. Out of that came Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Shuttle, Hubble, and rovers still working on Mars. From von Braun to von Braun's successors, from Cape Canaveral to Houston, how well do you know the agency that got there? 15 questions.
The Answer
The radiation belts that ring the Earth
James Van Allen of the University of Iowa had gotten a Geiger counter aboard Explorer 1, and the counts it sent back made no sense until you accepted something nobody had pictured: our planet is wrapped in belts of charged particles held in place by its own magnetic field. Explorer 3 confirmed it that spring, and the belts have carried Van Allen's name ever since. It is a fair emblem of the whole era. The money came from a superpower rivalry, and the science that came out of it was real, and permanent. Today's second quiz is about that bargain.
On This Day
On this day in 1958, Eisenhower signed NASA into existence, less than ten months after Sputnik 1 crossed the American sky and rearranged American politics. Almost everything that followed ran on the same fuel: the reactors, the computers, the radio telescopes, the research universities, the vaccines. Rivalry wrote the checks, and laboratories cashed them. Fifteen questions on the science the Cold War paid for.
Stay
Curious.
Bob
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