EduBeacon

1.On June 4, 1974 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) began construction of the very first orbiter of the new Space Shuttle Program. The orbiter carried the designation OV-101 but was later planned to be named constitution. However, after NASA received hundreds of thousands of letters from avid fans of the TV show STAR TREK requesting the space shuttle to be named Enterprise. NASA officials decided to seek the president’s approval for the name change. Declassified White House documents reveal that president Gerald Ford approved the renaming of the Space Shuttle for this exact reason. Prior to the 1960s the title Integrated Launch and Reentry Vehicle, or ILRV, was used to describe a vehicle for traveling between a planet’s surface and space. However, soon after the shuttle craft was introduced in STAR TREK, NASA officials began using the term Space Shuttle to describe such a vehicle. 2. Inside the Eagle Nebula, some 7000 ly from Earth, there...

In 1997 the very first commercial was filmed in space abroad the Russian Space Station Mir. A prominent advertisement agency filmed the commercial for an Israeli diary company and features a cosmonaut abroad the station drinking the company’s milk. In 2001, the American fast food chain Pizza Hut sent a vacuum sealed pizza to the astronauts and cosmonauts abroad the ISS as a commercial stunt. However, something more interesting happened back in 1993. A company known as Space Marketing Inc. announced that they would launch a giant billboard into low-earth orbit. The 1 Km  billboard would have been made of a lightweight polyester film and if it had been launched it would’ve appeared to be as large and bright as the moon. The project never progressed due to concerns about space debris and an inability to attract adequate funding. But more importantly, it was faced by immense opposition from the public and scientific community which is completely understandable as...