Before you can make a dream come true, you must first have one. — Ronald McNair The recently-released book The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby focuses on the “main characters” of 1978’s Astronaut Class 8…

How to open an iconic Disney attraction? Bring on the astronauts. As 1975 dawned, a soon-iconic attraction was on the cusp of opening at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. A part of the park’s rocket-strewn Tomorrowland, it was (and remains) situated just across from the sleek mid-century modern Contemporary…

We catch up with NASA’s rebel with many causes during his 1970s era. Apollo 9’s Russell “Rusty” Schweickart began the 1970s with a quest to figure out why he’d suffered from unwelcome bouts of space sickness aboard his March 1969 Earth orbital flight. After submitting himself to a series of…

A half-century before Prince Harry published his own “bad boy” reminiscences, NASA’s crown prince Walt Cunningham pioneered the genre. Walt Cunningham, the last surviving Apollo 7 crew member, died last week at age 90. But many in the space community were surprised he didn’t die at age 45 in 1977…

Why do we reach out to a hunk of rock 240,000 miles away? The Earth’s Moon — the globe of volcanic rock that lies approximately 240,000 miles from our planet — has inspired art, poetry, literature, and music throughout the centuries. It even inspired a retro video game — Lunar…

How Nichelle Nichols continues “to boldly go.” “Science is not a boy’s game, it’s not a girl’s game. It’s everyone’s game. It’s about where we are and where we’re going. Space travel benefits us here on Earth. And we ain’t stopped yet. There’s more exploration to come.” — Nichelle Nichols …

Frank Ellis lost both legs. Then he decided to become a NASA astronaut. Many people have asked me what I was thinking about when I finally realized my jet fighter was going to crash, probably taking me with it because I was only sixty-five feet above the ground, which is…

Sometimes, an old photo reveals new nuances. One “semi-myth” about the Apollo program is that they all followed the exact same template of “sequential steps” — first, test the command module; second, orbit the Moon; third, test the lunar module; perform a lunar landing dress rehearsal, and then land. But…

Fred Haise’s just-released website illuminates untold stories from the iconic astronaut’s life and career. August 20, 1968 covering period 8/13 to 8/20 This commences a new phase in my documentation due to a change in responsibility from a hardware manager to a member of a flight crew. Things have progressed…