After Congress stopped the Moon landings, NASA needed a new direction. Using a leftover Saturn V rocket, the giant rocket that sent men to the Moon, they created a space station that orbited above the Earth. This space station was called Skylab. Skylab was very big on the inside, even bigger than a small house. Skylab was visited by Apollo spacecrafts. There were three missions to Skylab. Each of them carried important experiments. The last crewed mission, Skylab 4, spent 84 days, 1 hour, 15 minutes, 30 seconds, longer than any space mission had spent until 1977. Skylab broke up in the atmosphere in 1979.
During the Space Race, the Soviets had designed their own spacecraft to fly to the Moon. Their spacecraft was called Soyuz. The Soviets never landed on the Moon, they had too many problems. Instead, they started creating small space stations. The Soyuz spacecraft is what they used to go to these space stations. US and Soviet Union were part of the Cold War. In order to make peace between Soviet Union and US, they decided they would dock an Apollo spacecraft to a Soyuz spacecraft in space. After docking, the crews performed experiments and learned about each other's cultures. Apollo–Soyuz was the last flight of the Apollo spacecraft. It has never been used since, and as of 2020, there are no plans for it to be used again.
In the 1980s and 1990s NASA began to concentrate on building Space Shuttles. Four Shuttles were built in 1985. The first to launch was the Space Shuttle Columbia in April 12, 1981. At this time the public began to lose interest in the space program and NASA faced budget cuts. They had planned for the Space Shuttles to cost less as they could be used more than once. But eventually it turned out the Space Shuttles were more expensive as building them in the first place cost more money than normal. There were further problems for NASA after the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated in flight in 1986, killing all seven of its astronauts. The incident is known as the Challenger Disaster.
The Challenger Disaster forced NASA to think about the way they worked. The entire Space Shuttle fleet was suspended for a year. After that, NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit. Its most famous photo was the Hubble Deep Field.
In 2011, NASA shut down the Space Shuttle program. They were more expensive to use than other launch vehicles.
In the early 1980s, NASA planned Space Station Freedom as a counterpart to the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations. It never left the drawing board and, with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, it was cancelled. The end of the Space Race prompted the U.S. administration officials to start negotiations with international partners Europe, Russia, Japan and Canada in the early 1990s in order to build the International Space Station. This project was first announced in 1993 and was called Space Station Alpha. It was planned to combine the proposed space stations of all participating space agencies: NASA's Space Station Freedom, Russia's Mir-2 (the successor to the Mir Space Station, the core of which is now Zvezda) and ESA's Columbus that was planned to be a stand-alone spacelab.
"Curiosity" is a car-sized rover. It was made to explore the crater Gale on Mars. "Curiosity" was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 15:02 UTC and landed on Aeolis Palus inside Gale on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17 UTC. The Bradbury Landing site was less than from where the rover landed after a journey. The goals of the rover include an investigation of the Martian climate and geology.
NASA is continuing operations include missions to the planets Mars, Saturn and Pluto. Missions to Jupiter are also planned for the near future. The New Horizons spacecraft flew past Jupiter in February 2007, studying some of the planet's moons. On July 14, 2015 the craft flew by Pluto, took high resolution pictures of the planet's surface and analysed the chemical properties of its atmosphere.
NASA announced in 2004 that they plan to have a permanent Moon base by 2020. A senior NASA administrator also stated in 2007 that NASA aims "to put a man on Mars by 2037".
However, in early 2010, President Barack Obama cancelled the Constellation project that was aiming to have humans return to the moon's surface by 2020. He said the project was "behind schedule and lacking in innovation". At the same time he cut back the amount of money NASA will be getting from the government in 2011.
When President Barack Obama did this, he also worked with NASA to create the Space Launch System. This, with commercial launch vehicles (launch vehicles that are not owned by NASA), will take humans to the Moon and Mars.
NASA has launched over 500 missions in its 50-year history. Over 150 missions had humans on board. Such "manned" missions are the most expensive and make the most news but the majority of launches are for space exploration, science, and other purposes that do not need people. NASA spacecraft such as Cassini-Huygens and the Voyager program have visited every planet in the Solar System. Four NASA spacecraft have left the Solar System, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. As of 2013 Voyager 1 is around 18,800,000,000 (18.8 billion) kilometers away from Earth.
Advaita Vedanta
Advaita Vedanta is a school in Hinduism. People who believe in Advaita believe that their soul is not different from Brahman. The most famous Hindu philosopher who taught about Advaita Vedanta was Adi Shankara who lived in India more than a thousand years ago.
Adi Shankara learned the sacred texts of Hinduism, like Vedas and Upanishads under his teacher Govinda Bhagavadpada and later wrote extensive commentaries of Hindu sacred texts called Upanishads. In these commentaries, he proposed the theory of Advaita, saying that the Upanishad actually teach that the individual soul (called Atman) is not different from Ultimate Reality (called Brahman). He also taught that there is only one essential principle called Brahman and everything else is a kind of expression of that one Brahman. Because of this theory of one being, his teachings became popular as the "Advaita" ("a" = not, "dvaita" = two, means no-two or non-dual). The way he said this to people was ""Atman is Brahman.""
Adi Shankara was smart and knew that people would wonder how he could say such an odd thing. He realized that many people would ask him, "If a person's soul is really one with Ultimate all along, then what makes a person feel so separate from Ultimate?" His answer to this was that we are ignorant of our real self being Ultimate because we see through a kind of filter—like looking through a dirty piece of glass—and he called this filter we look through, "maya", which means "illusion" in Sanskrit.
Shankara said that our ignorance makes us feel very separate from Ultimate, and even from everything around us. Shankara suggested that the best way people can find the truth is for them to try to clear their thinking of all ignorant thoughts, be very good, and think very hard about who they really are. He said that if a person did all these things he would realize that Brahman was himself all along.
This is a very similar idea to other religions at their esoteric core. For instance within Islam there is an idea of annihilation within the divine, and (Unity of Existence)
Parthenon
The Parthenon is a temple in the middle of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece (Europe). It was a temple to honor the goddess Athena for nearly 900 years, and originally had a huge idol to her. The name "Parthenon" means "the virgin's place" in Greek. It was built between 447 BC and 432 BC during the reign of Pericles. It is considered one of ancient Greece's greatest architecture accomplishments.