Dale DeBakcsy
A Bigger Boom: Mary Sherman Morgan, the World's First Woman Rocket Scientist.
On October 4, 1957, the United States received the greatest single blow to its prestige since the burning of the White House in 1814 with...
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Dale DeBakcsy
- Jul 23, 2023
Legacy, Suspended: Vera Rubin and the Ongoing Saga of Dark Matter.
When Vera Rubin died in 2016, for a brief moment the gaze of the Internet swung her way to notice her remarkable life and work, to say a...
60 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 27, 2023
Sarah Stewart Johnson, Mars, and the Search for Life as We Don’t Know It.
The Red Planet has not always been kind to those who have given their lives to its study. Before the rise of rover-based observation,...
3 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Trajectories: Katherine Johnson’s Orbital Mathematics
Before NASA, there was NACA, an oddball collection of aeronautics nerds using black box data and wind tunnel analysis to figure out as...
26 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
The Early Days of IBM at NASA: Evelyn Boyd Granville.
The IBM 650 was a marvellous beast. The world’s first mass-produced (and first profitable) computer, it was the mainstay machine of the...
227 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Maria Winkelmann and the Guilded Age of Astronomy
Back in the age when historians favored hard and fast lines between different Eras of world history, 1543 stood as the gold standard...
4 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
An ER Doctor in Space: The Story of Astronaut Rhea Seddon
The first astronaut class to include women candidates, announced in 1978 and self-dubbed the TFNG, or Thirty-Five New Guys, brought six...
48 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Space Biomedical Engineer Mamta Patel Nagaraja, the Woman Behind Women@NASA
When it comes finally time to settle Mars, the most terrifying sound might not be *RRRIP* or ‘I'‘m sorry, Dave, I don'‘t WANT to turn the...
1 view
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Champion of Chinese Heliocentrism: The Stellar Mathematics of Wang Zhenyi
An arrow hits a target as a fifteen year old girl on a horse goes galloping victoriously by. It is not an entirely unusual sight in late...
26 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Scheduling for Success, Preparing for Disaster: NASA Flight Controller Marianne Dyson
In between landing on the moon in July of 1969 and launching the first space shuttle into orbit in April of 1981, NASA learned a few...
414 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Beatrice Tinsley, the Birth of Galaxies, and the Ever-Expanding Universe
Dr Beatrice Tinsley lived on our resolutely turning planet for only four decades, but in that time she gifted us a vision of the cosmos...
580 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Queen Seondeok and the Construction of East Asia’s First Astronomical Observatory.
It is one of the great stories in the Korean royal tradition. A young princess named Deokman is brought a painting of peonies by her...
26 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Preparing for an Unknown Tomorrow: Astronaut Kathryn Sullivan and the Saving of the HST
This day, let us speak of a new type of hero, one whose life story is not told as a sum of new products invented and foisted upon an...
28 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
Summing the Cosmos: Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the Saga of the Cepheid Stars
Astronomy is the sifting science. Its practitioners rake the sky, star by star, collecting and cataloguing, and when they are done, they...
142 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 25, 2023
The Women’s Space Program That Wasn’t: The Story of the Mercury 13
The story of the Mercury 13, as it is usually told, features 13 heroes, 2 villains, and a throng of supportive roles stretched between...
427 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 24, 2023
Kepler, For the People: Maria Cunitz’s Urania Propitia and the Popularisation of Heliocentrism.
When Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) rewrote our conception of how heavenly bodies move by replacing the ideal and eternal circles of...
4 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 24, 2023
Before There was Sagan: How Helen Sawyer Hogg Brought Astronomy to the People
Before, ‘The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be,’ there was, ‘The stars belong to everyone,’ the...
211 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 24, 2023
The Concerns of the Earth, and Above: Mae Jemison’s Life in Medicine and Space Travel.
There is a bit of political wisdom we have lived with for half a century now, which says that spending money on space travel, while...
151 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 24, 2023
Jane Luu and the Discovery of the Kuiper Belt.
For a half century after the discovery of Pluto in 1930, the common wisdom was that it was the last, furthest member of our solar system,...
5 views
Dale DeBakcsy
- Apr 24, 2023
Studies in Expectation: Jocelyn Bell-Burnell and the Discovery of Pulsars.
Sometimes the hardest thing about living in the universe is knowing about it. There is real and true terror to be faced in the...
187 views
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