Washington – Bill Nelson says he never imagined he’d become administrator of the US space agency, NASA.
“I had no idea,” Nelson said, “and the truth is, I grew up in the shadow of the cape and never dreamed I’d have the opportunity to fly in space.”
Nelson served in both the House and the Senate as a Florida Democrat. In 1986, he trained and flew with the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia, becoming just the second sitting U.S. senator to travel in space, after Republican Senator Jake Garrn of Utah.
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“I flew on the space shuttle, and out of 135 flights, there were two tragic accidents, the first Challenger, 10 days after our spacecraft landed on Earth,” Nelson said. “It’s a hostile environment, and it was stressful both when the spacecraft was launching and when it was coming back.”
The Space Shuttle completed its final mission in 2011. Since then, NASA has collaborated with more and more private companies on space travel and research, and he says these partnerships help bring Americans together.
“Think about how our space history here has connected us. Think about all the times we were scared of the Soviets because they had outdone us and had the advantage. They had Sputnik, they had Yuri Gagarin, they were the first to orbit and go full circle,” Nelson said. “But… [a few] A few months later, John Glenn boarded the Mercury spacecraft. He boarded the spacecraft, which was on top of an Atlas rocket. There was a 20% chance of it exploding. Then Glenn completed three orbits, and that changed everything.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson spoke at a press conference at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC on September 14, 2023. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Nelson said space is part of the American psyche and makes the impossible possible.
“We choose to go to the Moon and do other things within this decade, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” President John F. Kennedy said in a speech at Rice University in 1962.
Kennedy’s speech has inspired decades of research at NASA. When NASA was created in 1958, Congress mandated by law that technology developed for space must also be practical on Earth.
“Since 1958, we have been making these technologies available to the public in the form of new products and services that improve our lives,” said Daniel Rockney, NASA’s technology transfer program director.[The technologies] Strengthening the U.S. economy, saving lives, and other truly amazing outcomes that will come as a result of this national investment in aerospace research.”
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Rockney has worked to transfer NASA’s inventions and intellectual property to the public sector.
“We get recognized for things we don’t do, which is a great problem to have,” Rockney said. “One of the things we don’t get recognized for is inventing the camera on your cell phone.”
In the 1980s, spacecraft imaging helped launch the digital camera industry, which used battery-powered devices to create images in space. By the following decade, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California was working to develop image sensors that consumed less power and were easier to mass-produce, resulting in the creation of miniature digital computer chips.
“We didn’t know what to do with it,” Rockney says, “and then Nokia approached us with this crazy idea to put a camera on a phone.”
The United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, carrying Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, lifted off from Pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on June 5, 2024. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said public-private partnerships in space help bring Americans together. (Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images)
The lightweight, high-resolution camera microchips didn’t require much power, making them ideal for spaceflight and portable personal devices.
“Now we have the blessing of having a camera to take pictures, and they’re really beautiful pictures,” Nelson said.
Bobby Brown, director of planetary science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), described the Mars Sample Return Flight System on October 14, 2021, at JPL in Pasadena, California. (Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
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While new technologies are developed on Earth to advance spaceflight, more and more research and innovation is happening in space. Astronauts are conducting experiments 24/7 aboard the International Space Station, Nelson said. Private companies are also sending astronauts into space to conduct experiments.
“The additional astronauts coming in will [research]”A lot of it is done independently with the support of pharmaceutical companies. Whenever they want to send people into space for longer periods, we have our astronauts stationed there,” he said.
