Welcome to the extraordinary side of NASA, where there is room for amazing stories!
1. Three Yemenis filed a lawsuit against NASA, claiming that Mars is the property of their ancestors
You read that correctly. The nineties were really dashing. When NASA launched the Pathfinder space shuttle and the Sojourner rover to explore Mars, several guys in Yemen said the Red Planet was their property, inherited over three thousand years ago.
The Heirs were very upset that the space agency had dared to land on the planet without their knowledge. For this reason, they filed a lawsuit against NASA and produced documents that "prove" ownership.
In response, NASA correctly explained to the Yemenis that Mars and the solar system belong to all of humanity.
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2. NASA lost video footage of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon
The understanding that the cassettes were lost came to the agency's specialists in 2006. The fruitless search ended in 2009, and NASA admitted that the legendary recordings were … erased. The legendary "moon walk" was mercilessly destroyed along with another 200 thousand records.
The historical video was recovered from television broadcasts, but the original was irretrievably lost. Perhaps one day it will pop up on some auction and go under the hammer at a price of millions of dollars, commentators on the Internet suggest.
3. NASA's vertical assembly building is so huge that it has its own weather forecast
The NASA vertical assembly building is quite large. So big that it sometimes rains there. Rain. From real clouds. Clouds inside the building. The structure, which was built in 1966, has an air conditioning system, but on the wettest days, clouds and rain still form under the ceiling. Interestingly, the 160-meter building has a single floor. It is the fourth largest building in the world, the height of its doors is 139 meters.
4. Astronauts are bathed in a huge pool
To prepare astronauts for life on the ISS, NASA built a replica on Earth - a giant pool. During training, astronauts spend six to eight hours underwater for each hour of activity outside the ISS (i.e., spacewalk). The giant pool contains 23.4 million liters of water. The idea of using immersion in water to simulate being in zero-gravity conditions was proposed back in the 60s of the last century.
5. NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson - creator of the water gun
Johnson joined NASA as Senior Systems Engineer for the Galileo mission to Jupiter. In 1982 Johnson tried to create a bathroom heat pump and decided to attach a homemade nozzle and hose to the sink. The water pistol was born! The engineer made a fortune on the commission received from those who wanted to sell pistols.