Space Exploration Facts

Astronauts get taller when they are in space.

The Space Shuttle main engine weighs 1/7th as much as a train engine but delivers as much horsepower as 39 locomotives.

Today's top fuel dragsters take off with more force than the space shuttle.

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

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up.

MDIF, a New York based non-profit organisation, is planning to beam free Wi-Fi to the entire world from space.

More than a dozen men have stood on the surface of the moon, but only three have been to Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, the deepest known spot in the ocean.

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.

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.

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.

Brian May, lead guitarist of Queen, spent more than 30 years finishing his PhD in astrophysics - then NASA put him on the OSIRIS-REx team. He used his 3D imaging skills to pick the landing spot on asteroid Bennu. The probe touched down in 2020, grabbed a sample, and that piece of Bennu reached Earth in 2023.

Hubble launched in 1990 with a $1.5 billion price tag - and a mirror ground to the wrong shape. The error was just 2 microns off, about 1/50th the width of a human hair, but enough to leave the telescope nearly blind. NASA became a late-night punchline. In December 1993, astronauts spent 35 hours across five spacewalks installing corrective optics in orbit. The images that came back were perfect.

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.