All Stories

Lasting nearly two months, Operation Air Safety was the first time that a group of federal employees used a nationally coordinated job action to obtain an agreement on working conditions. PATCO's actions also helped secure additional air traffic control funding—Congress added emergency money to the FAA's hiring budget shortly after the slow-down started—and contributed to the passage of legislation providing overtime pay for controllers.

Over 5,800 exoplanets have been discovered, with more and more being observed almost every day. But what makes these objects planets and not stars? How different are planets and stars, actually?

We talk to a real-life "Rosie the Riveter" and hear the story of how World War II transformed American aviation, manufacturing, and labor.

How many modelers have ever heard of, let alone built, a fully operational 3/8-scale aircraft capable of carrying an onboard pilot?

Before and during World War II, the Civilian Pilot Training Program trained thousands of licensed pilots and increased "airmindedness" nationwide. 

Over his whole career, Rodriguez destroyed three enemy aircraft in combat, making him one of only four Americans to get that close to achieving “ace” status (shooting down five aircraft) since 1972. 

We have been able to directly measure quakes on the Moon and Mars and refer to them as moonquakes and marsquakes.

Few astronauts were as famous as Jim Lovell—Tom Hanks played him in the 1995 movie Apollo 13. Lovell commanded that ill-fated space mission, which did not land on the Moon in 1970 because an oxygen-tank explosion crippled the spacecraft’s service module. 

Science fiction not only imagines different futures in space, it's a place where debates play out about what the future of space should entail. 

The majority of what has been accomplished in space has been carried out by uncrewed robotic craft.