Eclipse Balloons: Podcast – NASA

As part of the agency’s Artemis campaign, NASA has awarded Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, a CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) task order with an option to deliver a rover to the Moon’s South Pole region. NASA’s VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) will search for volatile resources, such as ice, on the lunar surface and collect science data to support future exploration at the Moon and Mars. “NASA is leading the world in exploring more of the Moon than ever before, and this delivery is just one of many ways we’re leveraging U.S. industry to support a long-term…

Transcript (music) Narrator: On a cold and wind-swept December day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a powered, controlled aircraft for 12 seconds – the first such flight in the history of the world. sound effect: aircraft flight Narrator: More than a hundred years later, in April 2021, another world saw its first powered, controlled aircraft flight when NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter lifted up into the skies of Mars. sound effect: helicopter rise Narrator: Teddy Tzanetos, team lead for the Ingenuity mission, says the trickier nature of helicopters made the first flight…

Transcript (music) [0:06] Narrator: You could say that NASA came out of thin air. NASA’s roots are in aeronautics, the study of how objects move through air. In 1915, the United States government formed the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA to develop airplane technology for World War I. For more than 40 years, NACA aeronautic research and experiments led to ever-more advanced planes, including ones that could fly supersonically – faster than sound. As we sought ways to go ever faster and higher, and even fly beyond Earth’s atmosphere and travel to the Moon, NACA evolved into…