Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
On March 12, 2021, United States Space Force (USSF) Captain Haida StarEagle achieved a notable milestone when she became that uniformed service’s first female Native American intelligence officer. Along with the U.S. Air Force (USAF) USSF is currently part of the U.S. Department of the Air Force. USSF was established in 2019. Its actual origins,... Continue Reading →
José Moreno Hernández was born on August 7, 1962, in the community of French Camp in California. His family was originally from the municipality of La Piedad in western Mexico’s state of Michoacán. During much of his childhood, as a matter of fact, Hernández and his family routinely spent half the year in the United... Continue Reading →
As a senior astronautical engineer at NASA, Irma Aracely Quispe Neira (widely known as Aracely Quispe) has made several noteworthy contributions to space and flight operations on behalf of that agency. Her accomplishments to date include becoming the first woman of Latin American descent to help oversee and lead three separate NASA missions. These major... Continue Reading →
On April 19, 2021, the autonomous NASA helicopter Ingenuity (nicknamed Ginny) lifted off the surface of Mars for what turned out to be a flight of 39.1 seconds. While decidedly brief, this ascent was also historic because it made Ingenuity the first aircraft to carry out a powered, controlled extra-terrestrial flight. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory... Continue Reading →
April 26, 1977 Samantha Cristoforetti, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, was born in the major Italian city of Milan. She grew up in Malé, a commune (municipality) that is likewise located in the northern region of Italy. Cristoforetti traveled to the United States at the age of 18 as an exchange student in the... Continue Reading →
Kayla Barron, whose passion for exploration has motivated her to both travel beneath the sea and fly into space, was born on September 19, 1987, in the city of Pocatello, Idaho. Her family eventually moved from the Gem State to the city of Richland, Washington. After graduating from Richland High School in 2006, Barron entered... Continue Reading →
In 1983, Guion Bluford became the first African American to fly into space when he went into orbit on board the Space Shuttle Challenger. The first African American astronaut was actually Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. He never had the opportunity to travel into space, however; in 1967 -- just a few months after being selected... Continue Reading →
Aerospace engineer Powtawche N. Valerino, who has been extensively involved in various space exploration efforts, is an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians (one of three federally recognized tribes of the Choctaw people). She was born to a Mississippi Choctaw mother and an African American father. Valerino has emphasized the extent... Continue Reading →
Wendy Lawrence has been a trailblazer in both her professional endeavors and personal life. She was a member of only the second class in the history of the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) to include women. Lawrence went on to pursue a record-setting career as a naval aviator. As a NASA astronaut, she became USNA’s first... Continue Reading →
Swati Mohan is an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a research and development center that is based in Pasadena, California, and managed by the California Institute of Technology. Since 2013, she has been significantly involved in the Mars 2020 mission. A large part of this mission has entailed dispatching both the rover... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 