Back To The Future
by Lisa Sonne"Taking humans out of the solar system is all theory right now,"
says astronaut Eileen Collins, the first female commander of a
space shuttle. "My dream is to find another planet like Earth in
our galaxy and a relatively quick way to travel there and back. I
don't think it's impossible."
"The single most important thing to come out of the Apollo program
was the photograph of the earth from the moon. It fundamentally
changed how we view ourselves," says Brant Sponberg, program
manager for NASA's Centennial Challenge program. With all the new
planets we are finding in other galaxies and the advancements in
space travel, he anticipates, "We will someday have a photograph of
another planet that looks like Earth. We will fundamentally change
again."
Yep, Tang Is Still In Space
For most baby boomers, Tang was as close as you could get to life
in outer space. While Gemini and Apollo astronauts sipped the
beverage circling the planet and heading to the moon, kids on Earth
could mix a little water with the orange powder and, voilà, a
cosmic taste of space life was there for the swallowing.
General Foods' clever advertising made Tang almost synonymous with
space, until publicly funded NASA stopped allowing commercial
endorsements for space products. Today, astronauts add water to
generic packets marked orange drink (but it's still Tang).
And now, they even have newer Tang flavors marked pineapple,
orange-mango, and peach-apricot.
Tang has been on every space shuttle mission, according to Karen
Ross, manager of food and product support for United Space
Alliance, a NASA contractor. "It was the very first drink flown in
space that was a rehydratable, sugar-based, fruit-flavored beverage
powder," she says. "That's important, so we can reduce the weight
of water in the food at liftoff."
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