Mars trip ‘can only be understood by black Americans’, tweets NASA, celebrating headquarters building name change – RT USA News

Long simply called “NASA Headquarters”, the Washington, DC building was officially renamed in Jackson’s honor on Friday. She became the space agency’s first black female engineer in 1958, seven years after joining her predecessor the National Aeronautical Advisory Committee (NACA).

While Jackson died in 2005 and was not known to have worked on any Mars-related projects during her lifetime, poet Nikki Giovanni paid tribute to the engineer, celebrating the building’s baptism with a poem about “Go to Mars.”

Because “We have rockets, fuel, money and everything” NASA will finally start sending humans to the moon again, Giovanni argued. The only reason NASA was holding back was their lack of control – “They don’t know if what they send will be what they get”, she said.

The trip to Mars can only be understood through black Americans

This is not the first step in changing the naming culture at NASA. In 2019, the agency unveiled Project Artemis as a more egalitarian complement to the Apollo missions, aiming to send the first woman (and the first man in 50 years) to the moon by 2024. However, the Trump administration s ‘is stopped before playing positive action. games with the crew, which in any case were not selected

Also on rt.com
NASA Says Moon by 2024 ‘No Longer Realistic’ But Maintains Artemis Program Despite Lack of Funding

NASA has repeatedly pushed back critical deadlines for Artemis, which will require entirely new hardware and extensive testing for the next generation of lunar landing hardware. While the 2024 deadline was already seen as optimistic at the end of 2020, more recent developments have made it all but impossible. Congress has largely starved the funding package that NASA has declared necessary, allocating just $ 850 million in its latest spending bill, compared to the $ 3.2 billion the agency wanted.

As a result, the agency quietly postponed the schedule for distributing lunar landing contracts from two months to the end of January, insisting that more time was needed to decide on landing system proposals. human resources that will continue to receive funding. While Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Dynetics all compete for the position, they now have until the end of April to submit their proposals, which NASA hopes to enable. “smooth transition” to the next phase of the project.

Read more

The previous U.S. administration signed a treaty in October to divide the “Use of the Moon, Mars, Comets and Asteroids for Peaceful Purposes” with seven other countries, while leaving out Russia and China, which had considerably more experience of lunar exploration. President Donald Trump seemed excited about the militarization of space with his space force, but it is unclear to what extent his successor Joe Biden plans to pursue this project, which seemed guaranteed to go against the Treaty on L 1967 outer space by turning space into a field. battlefield – or even an alien NATO.

Biden himself has been relatively silent on his predecessor’s dreams of exploring and exploiting space, losing shortly after his inauguration before sending more US troops to Syria. Given the hawk cabinet he has assembled, the president seems less interested in waging wars in space than in the tradition of his predecessors – waging wars in the Middle East.