PBS Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World
Learn the explosive history of the rocket, from its origin in ancient China, to its use as a weapon of war, to how adding hydrogen allowed it to…
Great Big Story – An Ex-NASA Astronaut’s Plan to Speed Up the...
Franklin Chang Díaz is a pioneer. As a child, he dreamed of going into space. As an adult, he made his wish come true. Diaz was the first…
CBC Quirks & Quarks
Franklin Chang Diaz flew on the space shuttle seven times and holds a PhD in plasma physics from MIT, so he knows a few things about rockets. Through his firm…
Briefings Magazine – Lessons from the Cosmos
The countdown sequence began for the space shuttle Columbia on the launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center. Strapped inside the cramped interior was astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz and…
‘A citizen of the world’: NASA’s first Latino astronaut reflects on how...
While the American memory of the Space Race is most often filtered through black-and-white photos of white men on the moon, NASA’s reality was Technicolor. People of color,…
Texas Monthly – The Astronaut Who Might Actually Get Us to Mars
We like to tell stories—often in blockbuster films and children’s books—that dramatize a direct path from the initial spark of an idea to its realization. Decades of hard…
Space Angels- Rocket Science: Solar-Electric Systems and In-Space Propulsion
Space industry devotées will remember a short-lived NASA program called the Asteroid Redirect Mission, or ARM. The goal of the ARM was to send a robotic envoy to…
ARS Technica – NASA’s plasma rocket making progress toward a 100-hour firing
Almost everyone recognizes that if humans are truly to go deeper into the Solar System, we need faster and more efficient propulsion systems than conventional chemical rockets. Rocket…
Forbes – A Plasma Rocket Engine May Get Us To Mars In...
Born the son of Chinese and Costa Rican parents and with just $50 in his pocket, Franklin Chang Diaz came to the U.S. to do his undergraduate studies…
Bloomberg – Space Junk Blocks Our Way to the Stars
Danger lurks in Earth’s orbit as thousands of rogue objects speed around the planet—and you can’t exactly call a guy with a truck to come sweep it all…