Apollo's Accomplishments

Modern day scientists, engineers and technologists adapted and evolved the basic principals that the Greek created, and they have been inspired by Greek gods and goddess to reach for the stars and to the ends of the earth. Despite the fact that the ancient Greek lived from 500 BC to 400 BC, companies like NASA, JPL, and Aurora have been naming their innovations and inventions after the ancient Greek deities, philosophers and creatures for a long time. Along with the inspiration the Greek provided, they have a physical connection to the modern world. Machines, like the clock, and technologies, like calculus and fluid dynamics are just some of the achievements of the Greek. One thing that the Greek are particularly well known for is their

If one has not heard of Apollo, as in the Greek god, most people can tell you that Apollo 11 was the NASA mission that brought the first men to the moon. As said in “What’s in a Name?” and, “Origins of NASA Names,” (Section 4, pg. 99), Apollo was chosen to be the name of the Manned Lunar Explorations in July of 1960. One day Dr. Abe Silverstein, former Director of Space Flight Programs and one of NASA’s founding fathers, found a picture of Apollo riding his sun chariot across the sky in a Greek mythology book. Silverstein proposed that this be the name of the project designed to bring man to the moon because Apollo was an appealing god and riding the sun across the sky was about how difficult the project was going to

In mythology Daedalus was an inventor who used a set of wax and feather wings that he created to help him and his son escape from imprisonment on the island of Crete. In 1988 students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology let this idea of manpowered flight inspire them to create a bicycle-type plane made of carbon fiber and ingenuity. The students’ plane took flight in April 1988 and set the record for the longest human-powered flight, by flying for four hours in near 123 mph winds. This success story inspired NASA to create a partnership with the MIT students and in 1989 John Langford, the manager of the Daedalus project, started Aurora. This company now specialises in making high altitude UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, for the military and to monitor climate change (source 2).
Not only did mythological Greek figures inspire scientists, engineers and technologists, but the creatures in these myths also are a source of inspiration. One example of this is the centaur. In myths, a centaur is a half-man half-horse creature, but NASA has named a series of unknown objects in space centaurs, due to their dual characteristics. Until recently, NASA has not been able to determine whether these centaurs are asteroids or comets. NASA and JPL have recently discovered that most centaurs are actually comets using their Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE (source