34 Literally Out Of This World Facts About NASA

In 1962, a programmer omitted a single hyphen in the code for the Mariner I rocket, causing it to explode shortly after take off. This typo cost NASA the equivalent of $630 million today.

27. The TLC network (Home of Honey Boo Boo, The Duggars, Little People, Sarah Palin's Alaska, etc) was originally created by NASA and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to provide "real education through the medium of television".

28. Neil Armstrong's NASA application was a week late. If it weren't for his friend, Dick Day, secretly slipping it into the pile, he would have been rejected.

29. Some people still believe that the earth is flat, and that earth is a disc encased by Antarctica and a 150-foot wall of ice at the edge, guarded by NASA employed security guards.

30. The body of an astronaut (Laurel Clark) killed in the Columbia disaster was found to have been looted and her wedding ring stolen. Plans by Texas Rangers and her widower to find the thief by informing the public were allegedly suppressed because ", it would not be good publicity for NASA."

NASA have their own special agents who are armed, have arrest authority and can execute search warrants.

32. NASA had an accident while testing spacesuits for the Apollo moon missions, and caught it on camera. The test subject (Jim Leblanc) was accidentally depressurized while in a vacuum chamber, and lost consciousness and experienced his own spit boiling. The team took nearly a minute to save him from the chamber.

33. NASA conducted a nap study on their pilots. They found that naps provided 34% increase in pilot performance and 100% increase in physiological alertness.

34. In 1973, NASA sent two spiders known as Arabella and Anita into space to see if they could spin a web without gravity. It took the spiders a couple days to figure it out, but they eventually ended up making webs that were finer and more complex than their earth counterparts.