26HI-SEAS IV mission
There's a team of NASA scientists (HI-SEAS IV mission) who've been pretending they're on Mars for nearly a year. They live and work in a dome on the side of a Hawaiian volcano and only go out in spacesuits.
27. NASA wanted to send Big Bird into space on the Challenger in 1986 to get children interested in space. The Big Bird suit was too big, however, so they sent teacher Christa McAuliffe instead. The Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff.
28. A 1997 poll found that Americans thought NASA represented approximately 20% of the federal budget. In reality, NASA represented 0.9% of the federal budget. The record high level of NASA funding was 4.4%.
29. NASA Astronaut Owen Garriott successfully pranked flight controllers by playing a recording of his wife whilst on SkyLab. There were no women on board the space station and he made it look like there was a stowaway.
30. NASA accidentally auctioned off for just $995 a bag that was used by Apollo 11 astronauts to collect the first lunar sample. When the buyer sent the bag to NASA for verification, the space agency realized its mistake and refused to return it.
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31Sally Ride
Before her 7-day trip to space, NASA engineers asked Sally Ride if 100 tampons was the right number for the mission.
32. According to NASA, the use of nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009 as a result of lower air pollution from reduced coal usage.
33. To shoot the candlelight-only scenes in the movie Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick used rare f/0.7 camera lenses manufactured by Carl Zeiss for NASA. Zeiss made only ten of the lenses; he sold three to Kubrick and six to NASA, who used them in the Apollo program to photograph the dark side of the moon.
34. Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad's first word upon setting foot on the Moon was "Whoopee!" in order to win a $500 bet with an Italian journalist that NASA didn't script astronaut declarations.
35. A NASA astronaut named Don L. Lind waited 19 years to fly in space. He was selected in 1966 but was chosen for canceled missions, or as a backup for missions. He said, "I was backing up two of the most depressingly healthy people you can imagine." He finally flew on the space shuttle in 1985.
