The American Space Agency is offering free software to users of Apple’s mobile equipment. It works with both iPhone and iPod Touch (provided that you are connected to a local WiFi network). This “NASA App” is a kind of portal that assembles and classifies the agency’s official news (text, images and videos) as well has having a navigation system that highlights the touch screen ergonomics. Be careful, however, when the application starts up as it does not seem to be listing all of NASA’s missions. You have to open the “Filter” menu in the top right hand corner and check the categories that you want to follow (Earth, Moon and Mars, Launch, etc.) in order to refresh the list and make it more complete, possibly by selecting everything. Without this manipulation, a mission as significant as Hubble, for instance, is not even covered! Once this ergonomic “error” has been corrected, the “NASA App” is full of promise.
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Soyuz in Guiana
This is the mythical rocket par excellence, the one that launched Sputnik, the first satellite and Gagarin, the first man in space. The CSG, Guiana Space Centre, is now one of its launch bases: a historic achievement.
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Star Trek and NASA
The first episode of this famous science-fiction series was broadcast in September 1966. NASA has often made references to these programmes, as in the case of the space shuttle Enterprise, which had the same name as the spaceship in the series.
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Alan Shepard, from suborbital to the Moon
50 years ago on 5 May 1961, a few weeks after Gagarin, American Alan Shepard reached space. Several years later, he was to walk on the Moon, summarising as it were the race in which the Soviet Union and the United States were competing.
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