IT Insights Blog — Space the Final Frontier

Did you ever wonder, as a child, what you would do for a living as an adult? Almost every kid wants to do something glamorous. Fight fires. Walk on the moon. Be a movie star. Join the circus as a lion tamer. Become the President of the United States. Sometimes the dreams get slightly more refined as a teenager: Learn to play the guitar and start a rock band, for example. Or maybe win a cooking competition on TV and become a world-famous restaurateur like Guy Fieri.

There's (apparently) terror on the high seas! And we mean really high. Like, sky-high. Literally. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas sounded the alarm earlier this week during a special hearing of the Subcommittee on Aviation and Space to discuss "The Emerging Space Environment: Operational, Technical, and Policy Challenges." Good for the Senate for continuing to make space exploration a priority. Or, well, that's probably at least a priority for some.

Don't look now, but NASA just landed a spacecraft on Mars. Somehow, news of the landing broke Monday and Tuesday with (more or less) zero fanfare. Which is odd, considering that we just completed a successful process that involves flinging a spacecraft way up into the exosphere, piloting it across hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and safely getting it down to surface, intact ...

At some point in the near future, possibly as soon as 25 or 30 years from now, a tiny spacecraft accelerated to one-fifth the speed of light (134 million MPH) by an Earth-based laser could arrive at the Alpha Centauri star system. Alpha Centauri contains three stars and at least two known planets, and we'll probably find out a lot more about our nearest stellar neighbor after the "nanocraft" arrives.

Depending on who you ask, it's either 50 miles or 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) straight up from the surface of Mother Earth to "space." The discrepancy is accounted for by a variation in measurement between the United States and the rest of the world. You might ask the students of Clint Thomsen, a CTE instructor for Tooele County School District in Utah. The kids have firsthand ...