Health Trotter

April 23, 2021 at 05:36PM Sian Proctor may owe her life to Apollo 11—literally. Born in Guam—the daughter of an engineer who worked at the local tracking station that helped NASA maintain communications with its lunar crews—she was the fourth child of a couple that she suspects did not plan for so many kids, and came into the world just nine months after Apollo 11 stuck its historic first moon landing. “I think I was a celebration baby,” she says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for human space flight.” Proctor herself has a lot to celebrate this year. Come September, if all goes to plan, the 51-year-old professor of geoscience at South Mountain University in Phoenix will climb aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and rocket into low-Earth orbit, spending up to three days aloft before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, won’t be the first aboard a SpaceX ship to carry crew; it won’t even be the second or the third. What it ...

April 23, 2021 at 12:28AM Rockets are built slowly—slowly and exceedingly carefully—which is in keeping with giant machines on which humans stake their lives and nations stake their prestige. In NASA’s cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, America’s next great moon rocket—the Space Launch System (SLS)—is being constructed with all that in mind. It is here too that TIME set up half a dozen cameras over the course of two months, capturing 3 million images for a time-lapse video that makes it possible to compress those months of work into just a few kinetic minutes. Under the eyes of the cameras, the rocket’s twin solid-fuel boosters came together—each of them 177 feet tall, weighing 1.6 million pounds and generating 3.6 million pounds (1.6 million kg) of thrust. Twenty-five percent taller than the solid boosters on the space shuttle, the twin engines are made of five separate segments, compared to the shuttle’s four. When they are completed, they will be attach...