Fun Facts

In space the skin on your feet peels off! This is a pretty gross fact but in the micro-gravity environment, astronauts are not using their feet to walk. Therefore the skin on their feet starts to soften and flakes off.

On Venus a day is longer than a year. This is tricky one to get your head around but a year on Venus (that is the length of time it takes to complete one whole orbit around the Sun) is 224.7 Earth days. However it takes 243 Earth days to rotate on its axis just once.

There are thousands of other planets out there. We have eight planets in our Solar System. However, outside of our Solar System there are thousands of other planets.

The astronauts were placed in quarantine after returning from the moon. There is a famous image of President Nixon talking to the Apollo 11 crew consisting of Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This continued until after the Apollo 14 crew returned safely. After this it was decided that the Moon did not contain any deadly diseases.

One million Earths can fit inside the Sun. Ancient astronomers once believed the Earth was at the centre of the Universe but now we know that the Sun is at the centre of our Solar System and our planets orbit the Sun. The Sun makes up 99.8% of the entire mass of the whole Solar System. One million Earths would be needed to be the same size as the Sun.

Cape Canaveral in Florida was chosen as a launch site because its proximity to the equator gives it more linear velocity than any other location in the United States.

In 1999 NASA lost an orbiter because half of the engineers were using metric measurements and the other half were using imperial measurements.

Because of lower gravity, a person who weighs 100kg on earth would only weigh 38kg on the surface of Mars.

IYou become taller in Space. Another change to the human body in micro-gravity is that spine straightens out, as gravity is not pushing you down. In fact you can be up to as much as 5cm taller in the Space Station.

Space is not that far away. Space officially begins at the universal marker of the Karman Line. This invisible boundary is 100km above the Earth. In theory if you could drive your car upwards, you could be in space in less than hour.

The area code for Kennedy Space Center and its surrounding regions is 321 (imitating the countdown before liftoff)

The toaster in your kitchen contains a more powerful computer than the one used by NASA to send astronauts to the moon. It only had 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz.

You can cry in space but your tears don’t fall. On-board the International Space Station, water floats like bubbles or spheres. However the water will cling to a surface until it is dislodged. This means that tears start to form bubbles around your eyes as the weightless environment is not causing your tears to fall.

As part of its staff training, NASA will show the movie Armageddon and asks the trainees to identify as many scientific inaccuracies as they can.

The Apollo crews did not have any life insurance. On the chance that the 3 man crew of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins did not return safely from the moon, they were not covered by any life insurance policy. So before their trip all 3 men signed photographs that could be sold in the event of their death.

Gregory Nemitz and his company Orbital Development apparently laid claim to asteroid 433 Eros. The spaceship NEAR Shoemaker landed on the asteroid in 2001 and Gregory subsequently issued NASA a parking ticket for $20.

In space metal sticks together. In a vacuum like space, when two pieces of metal touch each other they bond together. This is a process called cold welding.

In 2006 NASA admitted to having accidentally recorded over the original tapes of the moon landing. Fortunately NASA wasn't the only group recording. Copies found at CBS and Johnson Space Center are currently being restored.

NASA was sued by three men from Yemen for trespassing on Mars. They claimed that they had inherited the planet from their ancestors thousands of years ago.

The Vehicle Assembly Building is so big that it has its own weather. If it weren't for one of the world's most massive air conditioning systems, the Florida humidity would cause rain clouds to form near the ceiling.