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What is the Make NASA Great Series?

Sharing stories about my time at NASA began as a series of posts on LinkedIn.

Shortly after leaving NASA in 2022 (okay, I retired, but I hate that word), I signed up on LinkedIn and asked my handful of friends to connect with me. From there, I wrote a series of stories that highlighted points along my journey inside NASA.

In the series, I described how seeing Challenger break apart made me want to work at NASA. I shared the story of my first day at NASA, seeing my first full-scale solid rocket motor test, and being in Washington, D.C. on 911 when the planes crashed into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon.

In the series, I also had a guest post from a young lady who aspires to be an astronaut, someday, and a guest post from the son of the first astronaut who flew in space untethered.

But it didn’t take me long to realize that LinkedIn isn’t the best platform to put things you want people to be able to find and read months later. By my unscientific calculations, LinkedIn posts have a shelf life of about one day.

Shortly thereafter, I decided to use NASAology.com as my more permanent platform.

Make NASA Great Series Artwork

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for ‘lorem ipsum’ will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

Make NASA Great Series as an Experiment

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

Make NASA Great Series Ends

There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.

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