Tag: nasa

What really happened to Ronald Hunkeler, who inspired ‘The Exorcist’

Ronald Edwin Hunkeler was a NASA engineer who patented a special technology to make space shuttle panels resistant to extreme heat, helping the Apollo missions of the 1960s that put US astronauts on the moon in 1969.

But Hunkeler also had another claim to fame: He was the secret real-life inspiration for the demon-possessed kid in “The Exorcist.”

His identity has been kept under wraps since a series of exorcisms he underwent as a young teenager in Cottage City, Md., and St. Louis, Mo., in 1949.

For decades he was known only by the pseudonyms “Roland Doe” or “Robbie Mannheim.” His identity has been something of an open secret among the community of Jesuits who were close to the priests who participated in his exorcisms and a handful of academics and reporters who studied the phenomenon beginning in the mid-1970s.

But he lived in fear of more people finding out the truth.

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NASA pushes back time frame for human moon mission to 2025

NASA is extending its target date for sending astronauts back to the moon to 2025 at the earliest, the U.S. space agency’s chief said on Tuesday, stretching out by at least a year the timeline pronounced under former President Donald Trump.

Trump’s administration had set the aggressive goal of returning humans to the lunar surface by 2024, an initiative named Artemis intended as a stepping stone toward the even-more-ambitious objective of sending astronauts to Mars.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson cited delays from legal wrangling over the SpaceX contract to build the Artemis lunar landing vehicle as a major reason for extending the target date.

“We lost nearly seven months in litigation, and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025,” Nelson told a news conference. “We are estimating no earlier than 2025 for Artemis 3, which would be the human lander on the first demonstration landing.”

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Kamala Harris Demands To Know If NASA ‘Can Measure Trees’ By Race To Get ‘Environmental Justice’

Democrat Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris interrupted a presentation by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to ask if the agency “can measure trees” in low income areas to find hidden racism and help establish “environmental justice” for non-white people.

“Can you measure, um, trees?” Harris demanded, pointing at the screen with an index finger. “Because part of that data that you’re referring to, and it’s an EJ, it’s environmental justice. But you can also track, by race, their averages in terms of the number of trees in the neighborhood where people live.”

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NASA hopes UFOs are not adversaries from Earth

The current NASA Director Bill Nelson says he hopes that UFOs are not originating from an adversary here on Earth in an unprecedented statement.

“I’ve talked to those pilots and they know they saw something, and their radars locked on to it. And they don’t know what is. And we don’t know what it is. We hope it’s not an adversary here on Earth that has that kind of technology. But it’s something,” Nelson said.

“And so this is a mission that we’re constantly looking, ‘Who is out there?’ Who are we?’ How did we get here? How did we become as we are? How did we develop? How did we civilize? And are those same conditions out there in a universe that has billions of other suns and billions of other galaxies?’ It’s so large I can’t conceive it,” he added during a live stream chat hosted by politics professor Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics.

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NASA Awards SpaceX, Blue Origin, and 3 Other Companies $146 Million in Contracts to Go to the Moon

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, announced this week the award of five contracts for $146 million to U.S. companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to design lunar landers.

As reported by Forbes, these private companies will work over the next 15 months on various projects for the development of the Artemis program to ensure the return of humanity to the moon in 2024.

Contracts are well distributed, according to the statement from NASA:

  • SpaceX: $9.4 million
  • Blue Origin: $25.6 million
  • Dynetics: $40.8 million
  • Lockheed Martin: $35.2 million
  • Northrop Grumman: $34.8 million

The idea is that the five companies develop sustainable models of landing modules to regularly transport astronauts to the moon. Much of what is designed for Earth’s satellite will apply to future missions to Mars.

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Russia Blames American Astronaut for Mysterious Space Station Hole

The strange case of a mysterious hole discovered in a Soyuz capsule attached to the International Space Station back in 2018 has taken a troubling turn as an official with the Russian space agency now says that the damage was intentionally caused by an American astronaut. The bold accusation reportedly came by way of an article from the Russian news agency TASS. In the piece, an anonymous “high ranking” official with the Russian space agency put forward a rather elaborate scenario for how the curious hole, which measured approximately 2 millimeters in diameter, in the Soyuz capsule came to be and pointed the finger at American astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancello as the alleged culprit.

The unnamed Russian source claims that, which serving about the ISS, the astronaut suffered from a blood clot in her jugular vein. This condition, they assert, caused Auñón-Chancello to have “an acute psychological crisis” wherein she tried to damage the Soyuz capsule in a manner that would facilitate her early return to Earth. How, exactly, such an audacious plan would have worked goes unsaid, though the Russian official did note a number of curious elements about the incident which led to the space agency’s surprising conclusion that the creation of the hole was a proverbial inside job.

Specifically, they raised suspicions about the fact that a video camera monitoring the area had stopped working, that NASA refused to perform polygraph exams on the astronauts who were aboard the ISS when the damage was done, and that the evidence suggests that the hole was created by someone inside the capsule operating in a weightless environment, meaning it had to have been made by someone in space at the time. As one might imagine, NASA is not buying the conspiracy theory offered by the Russian space agency official and strongly pushed back against the accusation.

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