Tag: NASA

Space Shot

From Twitter

Read
We_①_ been _②_ #Shuttle 31 years when it was _③_ in 2011. May 27 @ 5:33am Asia Pacific Time (4:33pm Eastern Standard Time) 2 @NASA astronauts launch on a @SpaceX #Falcon #CrewDragon to the #ISS. Watch @ http://nasa.gov.

Choose
had
has
fly
flew
flying
flown
canceled
cancellation

Answers And Explanations
1. had (because been is present)
2. flying (because had+ been requires a gerund)
3. cancelled (because the past tense is necessary after was in this context)

Photo Credit: The Verge
Apologies to @SpaceCoastDaily
for the image of @AstroBehnken
& @Astro_Doug
Hurley.

He Never Bought The Farm

From Twitter

Neil Armstrong had a farm after NASA, so he never bought the farm during the Korean war, as a test pilot nor on either of his two space missions.

“He bought the farm” means:
a. to pay for a farm
b. to pay for the farm
c. to get a farm
d. not pay
e. none of the above.

Answer And Explanation
The answer is: e. none of the above. He bought the farm means to die and was originally coined by pilots who crashed into farms in test flights or in air battle.

Famed astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon during the historic Apollo 11 space mission in July 1969, served for seven years as a research pilot at the NACA-NASA High-Speed Flight Station, now the Dryden Flight Research Center, at Edwards, California, before he entered the space program. Armstrong joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory (later NASA’s Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio, and today the Glenn Research Center) in 1955. Later that year, he transferred to the High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards as an aeronautical research scientist and then as a pilot, a position he held until becoming an astronaut in 1962. He was one of nine NASA astronauts in the second class to be chosen. As a research pilot Armstrong served as project pilot on the F-100A and F-100C aircraft, F-101, and the F-104A. He also flew the X-1B, X-5, F-105, F-106, B-47, KC-135, and Paresev. He left Dryden with a total of over 2450 flying hours. He was a member of the USAF-NASA Dyna-Soar Pilot Consultant Group before the Dyna-Soar project was cancelled, and studied X-20 Dyna-Soar approaches and abort maneuvers through use of the F-102A and F5D jet aircraft. Armstrong was actively engaged in both piloting and engineering aspects of the X-15 program from its inception. He completed the first flight in the aircraft equipped with a new flow-direction sensor (ball nose) and the initial flight in an X-15 equipped with a self-adaptive flight control system. He worked closely with designers and engineers in development of the adaptive system, and made seven flights in the rocket plane from December 1960 until July 1962. During those fights he reached a peak altitude of 207,500 feet in the X-15-3, and a speed of 3,989 mph (Mach 5.74) in the X-15-1. Armstrong has a total of 8 days and 14 hours in space, including 2 hours and 48 minutes walking on the Moon. In March 1966 he was commander of the Gemini 8 or (more at https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-111-AFRC.html)


Always–yet… still!

Fill in:
NASA __ does many tests before flying a new spaceship, __ the Boeing Starliner didn’t reach the space station. It went to the wrong orbit. Now the ship is __ in space.

a. yet
b. still
c. always

The answers are: c, a, b; look:
NASA _always_ does many tests before flying a new spaceship, _yet_ the Boeing Starliner didn’t reach the space station. It went to the wrong orbit. Now the ship is _still_ in space.

Explanation
The first answer. Always refers to repeated, cyclic and unchanging conditions, habits, protocols or procedures. ‘Still’ would be grammatically okay here, but it is needed elsewhere in the passage, and in that place where it belongs, the other choices would also work grammatically but not be the best and/or not make sense.

The next answer, ‘yet’, provides a contrast with the information and adverb ‘always’ in the first answer; ‘always’ indicates something continuous or repeating without fail under certain conditions–and thereafter, ‘yet’ tells us a break in that consistency is coming. ‘Yet‘ also acts like the conjunction ‘but’.

Finally, the last answer, ‘still’ tells of a thing that has not ended. Again, all the options work in the space, but then in the other combinations would not make sense.