[Tee tiong huat]

Harold White, known to his friends as Sonny, was only 11 years old when the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum was unveiled in his home city of Washington, D.C. in summer of 1976. He and millions of other visitors explored the museum’s halls to marvel at decades-old airplanes and space modules that had only just returned Earth-side, including the Apollo 11’s command module, Columbia. 

It had remained in orbit as Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on moon. For White, visiting the museum became a pivotal moment that would ripple through his life and career as both a NASA scientist and dogged investigator of one of science’s most challenging problems: how to reach the stars.

As an avid Star Trek fan and a kid who showed an aptitude for math, White says his path toward studying space may have been predetermined, but wandering the museum’s halls helped stoke the flame. “This premise and the promise of space exploration for humanity just really always stuck with me,” he says. 

After all, we still haven’t sent people past the Moon, a cosmic stone’s throw from home, and our fastest unmanned spacecraft, Voyager 1, will take 75,000 years to reach our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri.

https://www.earth.com/news/two-enormous-...ay-galaxy/ (1)
https://www.businesstoday.in/visualstori...18-02-2025 (2)