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#28. History and Hackathons
Here are this week's 3 links worth exploring:
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Currently in beta, The NASA History Series is an online archive of histories, chronologies, and interviews prepared by the space agency's History Office. Many of the items are packaged as ebooks and free to download: https://beta.nasa.gov/history/history-publications-and-resources/
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Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience chronicles the early use of computers in NASA missions, highlighted by the needs of the Apollo voyages that pushed the technology of the time to the limit. Reducing room-sized computers to the required suitcase dimensions necessary to outfit the lunar lander meant that NASA was as much a catalyst of cutting-edge innovation as a user of it: https://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html
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On 7-8 October, NASA Space Apps Challenge Manchester will be the latest iteration of the NASA International Space Apps Challenge, "an annual global 48 hour hackathon that encourages participants to choose from a range of Earth and space related challenges set by NASA and create a solution over the duration of the hackathon." Being a virtual event, you don't actually have to be in Manchester. All ages, skill levels, and backgrounds are welcome: https://spaceappsmanchester.com/
Quote of the Week: "The first person to realize the potential of the rocket for space travel was neither an established scientist nor a popular science fiction author. He was an obscure secondary school mathematics teacher in a rural section of Russia. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky may have begun to ponder the physics of rocket-propelled spaceflight as early as the 1870s ... [and was also] one of the first to propose solar sailing as a non-rocket form of space travel." — Solar Sails: A Novel Approach to Interplanetary Travel, Second Edition (Springer, 2015)
Onward!
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