On May 27, if all goes as planned, American astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, wearing NASA badges, will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket.
I have always been in love with space travel. I was born in the summer of 1969 when a man set foot on the Moon. I grew up a lover of Star Trek, of Star Wars, of Battlestar Galactica, of 2001: A Space Odyssey, of all forms of science fiction in which humankind leaves the bonds of terra firma and travels into the void, to the planets, to the stars.
Rockets, space stations, habitats, and bases on the moons and planets intrigued me as a child, and also throughout my entire adult life. So much that I have spent part of my professional career as a writer addressing our national space program, including a look back at the technologies that enabled the Apollo landings[1], and interviewing people who made it possible.
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The exploration of space with human crews has always been NASA's primary mission. Since the conclusion of the Apollo program in the late 1970s, the cost justification of the manned space program in the United States has always been the development of technologies used in space travel that could also improve the American way of life, through cross-pollination of private industries involved with the program.
These technologies include the development of microprocessors used in the spacecraft themselves that eventually made their way into commercial computer systems, and of course, virtually every electronic