The first game to be played in space was Starcraft – Daniel Barry took it with him in 1999 on the Space Shuttle mission STS-96.
100 Mind-Blowing Mission Facts
Kennedy Space Centre, dubbed Florida’s Space Coast, is the only travel destination with a beach that doubles as a launch pad. Artemis 3 is currently planning a lunar landing mission to put the first woman and person of colour on the moon, with an estimated launch date in 2025.
Alan Shepard played golf on the moon. He is also the one and only person to play golf on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission. His second shot travelled further than 200 yards.
The Apollo 11 crew pre-made autographs for insurance. The Apollo 11 crew was prepared for the chance that they may not be able to return from their voyage. In an attempt to financially prepare their families, they signed many trinkets that their families could sell if the mission failed.
A space mission confirmed that frogs can vomit. The frog puked out its entire stomach which caused its organs to dangle out of its mouth. The frog then used its forearms to dig out the stomach’s contents and swallow the organs again.
Coca-Cola was the first soft drink consumed in space. Applesauce was the first food eaten in space by John Glenn during the Friendship 7 mission of 1962.
NASA’s Moon landing mission wasn’t entirely true. When the astronauts landed back on Earth, their quarantine procedure was a performative one.
The heat from the Big Bang is still around today. The early Universe consisted of a hot soup of ionised gas: a sort of opaque plasma. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this gas cooled sufficiently enough that atoms were able to form. Radiation left over from the Big Bang is still around us today and is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It can’t be seen with the naked eye, but various missions over the years have been able to study it in microwave light, including ESA’s Planck satellite and the WMAP mission.
Golf is one of only two sports ever played on the moon. In 1971, Alan Shepard hit a ball with a six-iron while on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 mission. The other sport was a javelin toss, during the same visit.
Earth has a squishy interior. Earth’s interior is not solid but rather has a semi-solid or ‘squishy’ consistency owing to high temperatures and pressures. This squishy consistency allows the mantle to flow and move over geological timescales, which is responsible for phenomena such as plate tectonics, volcanic activity and Earthquakes. One consequence of this squishy interior is a process known as post-glacial rebound. During the last ice age, large portions of Earth’s surface were covered by glaciers, causing the underlying mantle to deform and sink. As the glaciers melted and receded, the mantle slowly rebounded back to its original position over thousands of years, causing the land above it to rise. This process is still occurring today in places such as Canada, Scandinavia, and Greenland, where the land is still rebounding from the weight of the glaciers that once covered the region. Recent research has found that West Antarctica is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, thanks to data from ESA’s GOCE gravity mission. The study of post-glacial rebound provides important insights into the structure and behaviour of Earth’s interior, and how it responds to changes in the surface environment over long timescales.
Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth. More than six times as large as Greenland, Antarctica is the southernmost continent and is the coldest and windiest place on Earth – with temperatures that can drop as low as -89.2°C and winds that can exceed 320 km per hour. Antarctica is home to the largest ice sheet on Earth, containing a staggering 30 million cubic kilometres of ice. This represents an incredible 70% of Earth’s freshwater and 90% of its ice. As a result, changes to the Antarctic ice sheet can have significant implications for global sea levels and ocean currents. Monitoring the Antarctic ice sheet is therefore of paramount importance and satellite data plays a crucial role in this effort. Data from satellites such as CryoSat, ESA’s ice mission, allow scientists to track changes in the thickness and movement of the ice sheet over time, providing insights into how it is responding to a changing climate. ESA has recently teamed up with NASA and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to carry out an ambitious campaign in Antarctica which involved taking simultaneous measurements of sea ice from ESA’s CryoSat and NASA’s ICESat-2 satellites. This research is essential for informing policy decisions on issues such as climate change and sea level rise, and for developing strategies to mitigate their impact on coastal communities around the world.
Earth’s magnetic pole is creeping westward. Unlike our geographic North Pole, which is in a fixed location, Earth’s magnetic north wanders. Until the early 1990s, the magnetic North Pole was known to lie some 1600 km south of true north, in Canada. Yet scientists realised that the location of the magnetic north wasn’t fixed and was drifting at a rate of 15 km a year. Since the 1990s, however, the drift of Earth’s magnetic pole has turned into more of a sprint. Its present speed is around 50-60 km a year and is making a dash towards Siberia at a pace not seen before. Why? Scientists studying the drift of Earth’s magnetic north pole, using data from ESA’s Swarm mission, have pinpointed a change in the circulation pattern of magnetic blobs deep below Earth’s surface. They learned a change in the flow underneath Canada has caused a patch of magnetic field at the edge of Earth’s core, deep within the Earth, to be stretched out. This has weakened the Canadian patch and resulted in the pole shifting towards Siberia.
Trees are breathers. Trees are one of the most effective tools we have to combat climate change. Forests are home to around 80% of biodiversity on land and tropical forests alone produce over 40% of the oxygen we breathe. Covering around 30% of Earth’s land surface, we depend on forests for our survival. Forests absorb around 8 Gigatonnes a year of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and play a crucial role in the carbon cycle and climate system. However, climate change, forest degradation and deforestation are causing much of this stored carbon to be released back into the atmosphere. Recent research found that recovering tropical forests was only successfully combating a quarter of the current carbon emissions which indicates the importance of preserving and restoring our tropical forests. To better understand the role of trees in regulating our planet’s carbon cycle, ESA’s upcoming mission called Biomass will use advanced radar technology to measure the amount of carbon stored in Earth’s forests and other biomass, providing a more accurate assessment of carbon storage and uptake than ever before. By monitoring changes in biomass over time, scientists will be able to assess the effectiveness of forest conservation efforts and better understand the impact of deforestation on our climate.
The Titanic wreckage was discovered during a top-secret mission to search for sunken nuclear submarines. Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic wreckage, originally went to the US Navy to request funding to develop an advanced robotic submersible that would allow him to search for the wreckage. The navy liked his idea but decided to use it to search for two lost US nuclear submarines. The mission finished early, and Ballard was able to use the extra time to discover the lost ship.
Only one married couple has ever been sent to space. Mark Lee and Jan Davis met during their astronaut training programs but decided to keep their relationship secret. NASA had an informal policy against sending out married couples on missions. Nine months before their mission, they got married, and by the time NASA found out it was too late to begin training replacements. Instead, they made their informal policy formal to prevent it from happening again!
The original Xbox had sound snippets of real space missions. The original Xbox contained edited sound bites from actual transmissions from the Apollo missions. If you left the Xbox on the home screen, eventually, you’ll hear whispers of conversation – actual chatter from the Apollo mission.
Apollo 11 astronauts couldn’t afford insurance. Life insurance for a space mission cost a fortune because the risks were extremely high back then. So instead, the astronauts of Apollo 11 signed hundreds of covers that their families could sell in case anything went wrong.
The Nintendo Game Boy went to space. In 1993, a Soviet cosmonaut brought his Nintendo Game Boy to space on the TM-17 space mission. It is said to have orbited Earth 3,000 times and was later auctioned for $1,220.
Linux isn’t just used on Earth. To get insights into life on Mars, a crucial mission was planned by NASA in 2020 where the robotic helicopter that accompanies the rover on Mars runs on Linux. Essentially, Linux landed on Mars and is flying as you read this.
Mission: The primary mission of the NSA is to lead the U.S. Government in cryptology, encompassing both SIGINT insights and cybersecurity products and services. This dual focus ensures comprehensive national security.
Counterterrorism Expert: A counterterrorism expert who was part of the operation to kill Osama bin Laden shares insights on how NSA’s foreign SIGINT contributed to the mission’s success.