NASA Facts

Coca-Cola was the first soft drink to be consumed in outer space.

In the “Forrest Gump” novel that the movie is based on, Forrest goes into space with NASA. Upon return, he crash lands on an island full of cannibals. He only survives because he beats the head cannibal at chess everyday.

During photosynthesis, plants emit light humans can’t see, but NASA can see that light from space - and they've even made maps of it!

In the 1960s, neuroscientist John Lilly conducted NASA-funded experiments where researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt lived with a dolphin named Peter for months, attempting to teach him to vocalize English words.

The ashes of the man who discovered Pluto are currently en route to dwarf planet, scheduled to arrive on the 14th of July, 2015.

The inventor of the Super Soaker squirt gun was a NASA Scientist who also helped develop the Stealth Bomber and the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

The dwarf planet Ceres, located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, baffled scientists when NASA's Dawn spacecraft photographed mysterious bright spots on its surface in 2015. The gleaming patches sparked wild theories—from ice volcanoes to alien bases—before researchers discovered they were actually salt deposits left behind by briny water seeping up from an underground ocean.

NASA-funded research led to the discovery that certain algae could produce DHA and ARA, omega fatty acids now added to over 90% of infant formulas worldwide.

On Hubble's last repair mission, astronaut Mike Massimino stripped one screw. It held a handrail blocking a dead instrument behind 111 more screws. The ground team tested a fix and sent up the plan: brute force. So Massimino, who later played himself on The Big Bang Theory, tore the handrail off by hand. The instrument he helped fix still measures starlight.

Nancy Carlson bought a plain bag at a government surplus auction for $995. It turned out to be Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 lunar sample bag - still containing actual moon dust from the first landing. NASA demanded it back. A federal judge ruled Carlson was the legal owner. She sold it at Sotheby's for $1.8 million. The moon was in the clearance bin.

After returning from the Moon, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were required to fill out a standard US Customs declaration form. Under "cargo" they listed moon rock and moon dust samples, and when asked about any condition that might spread disease, the answer was "TO BE DETERMINED." The form was filed at Honolulu Airport on July 24, 1969 - the same day they splashed down.

Lonnie Johnson, a NASA engineer, invented the Super Soaker by accident - a burst of water shot across his bathroom during a heat pump experiment. The toy went on to sell nearly $1 billion. When Johnson discovered Hasbro had underpaid his royalties for years, he took them to arbitration and won $72.9 million.

Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest mirror. Once a year, seasonal rain covers 10,582 square kilometres of salt so flat the horizon vanishes. You appear to walk on the sky. The surface varies less than a metre in elevation across the entire expanse. Space agencies calibrate their altimeters here - five times better than open ocean.

Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan was driving the Moon rover in December 1972. The nearest repair shop was 238,000 miles away. A hammer in his pocket snapped off the rear fender. Moon dust began coating the crew and the rover's controls. Mission Control spent the night designing a fix. Cernan and Schmitt taped four lunar maps together and clamped on the homemade fender. It held for the rest of the mission. The fender is still on display today.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour crawled through a Los Angeles neighborhood like a beached spaceship in 2012. Crews spent three days towing the retired orbiter 12 miles to a museum, felling about 400 trees to clear its wings. It paused outside Randy's Donuts, and a stock Toyota Tundra hauled the 150,000-pound shuttle across a freeway bridge as up to a million people watched.

NASA lost Snoopy in space for 50 years. The Apollo 10 lunar module was named after the cartoon beagle. In 1969 astronaut Tom Stafford flew it within 9 miles of the Moon to scout Apollo 11's landing site. Then NASA fired its engine, sent it into orbit around the Sun and lost track of it. In 2019 amateur astronomers said they were 98 percent sure they had found it. Snoopy is still out there, circling the Sun.

NASA built a full-scale twin of the James Webb Space Telescope. They called it the Pathfinder. Engineers froze it to -400 degrees F inside NASA's biggest cryogenic chamber to prove the mirror-support structure would hold its exact shape in deep space's cold. The real Webb launched in 2021. The Pathfinder just went on permanent display at the Smithsonian. It's the closest thing on Earth to the real Webb.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum opened without scissors. On July 1, 1976, NASA beamed a signal from the Viking 1 spacecraft, already orbiting Mars but not yet landed. The signal crossed nearly 200 million miles of space and cut the ribbon instead. Fifty years later to the day, it reopened with 5 new galleries after an 8-year rebuild.

Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama has turned kids into pretend astronauts since 1982. Christina Koch went three or four summers as a kid and begged to go back every time. On April 6, 2026 she flew around the far side of the Moon on NASA's Artemis II, the first crewed lunar flyby since Apollo 17 and farther than any woman had ever flown. One of Space Camp's own kids made it to the Moon.

Jupiter produces lightning bolts up to 1,000 times more powerful than anything on Earth, generated by towering clouds of ammonia and water that don't exist anywhere else in the solar system. NASA's Juno spacecraft discovered that ammonia vapour melts high-altitude ice crystals on Jupiter, creating an exotic 'antifreeze' cloud system that generates these extreme electrical discharges.