• Jay Barbree is the only journalist to have covered every manned space flight in the United States, beginning with Alan Shepherd's maiden voyage in 1961?

Facts on topics related to Jay Barbree

NASA

• freestyle wrestler William Kerslake, who competed in three Olympiads and got a gold medal at the 1955 Pan American Games, was also a NASA engineer and co-inventor of of the first ion thruster for space propulsion?
• Jesuit Donald Merrifield, the first president of Loyola Marymount University after its creation, worked as a consultant for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory?
• NASA astronaut Stephen Robinson has logged 497 hours in space?
• NASA terraforming expert Christopher McKay has explored the Gobi Desert, Siberia and Antarctica to study extremophilic life forms?
• NASA conducts field trials, called Desert RATS, for new technologies for manned exploration of the surface of the Moon, Mars, or beyond?
• NASA engineer Harvey Allen's "Blunt Body Theory" made possible the design of heat shields that protected the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts?
• NASA inventor and scientist, Dr. Pedro Rodriguez is the son of the renowned Puerto Rican salsa singer, the late Pellin Rodriguez?
• NASA offers interested individuals opportunities to fly small experiments aboard the space shuttle called Getaway Specials?
• NASA test pilot Joe Walker's X-1E and record-setting X-15 were two of the very few research aircraft to have nose art? (pictured, Joe Walker and the X-1E)
• Rocketdyne's E-1 rocket engine never saw production, but gave NASA confidence to develop the F-1 that powered the Saturn V to the Moon?

Apollo program

• Norwegian geochemist Knut S. Heier was a member of the Apollo Project?
• during World War II, Paul C. Donnelly (pictured) helped develop the U.S. Navy's Bat, the first U.S. "smart bomb", and later was a senior NASA manager during the Apollo program?
• the automated Launch Processing System used by NASA for Space Shuttle launches has reduced the required number of firing room personnel to half of those required for an Apollo launch?

Neil Armstrong

• Michael Jackson's autobiography, Moon Walk, was given the code name "Neil Armstrong", that of the first "moonwalker"?

Project Gemini

• NASA engineer Harvey Allen's "Blunt Body Theory" made possible the design of heat shields that protected the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts?

Human spaceflight

• in addition to human spaceflight, there have been many animals in space, including monkeys, apes, mice, dogs, guinea pigs, frogs, rats, cats, tortoises, fish, newts, insects, snails, spiders and nematodes?

Kennedy Space Center

• Radmilla Cody sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Navajo at the Kennedy Space Center in 2002?

Apollo 11

• Jeff Hawke, a science fiction comic strip, almost perfectly predicted the date of the first human moon landing more than ten years before?
• a small silicon disc containing goodwill messages from 73 countries was left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts?