NASA will hold a series of events Tuesday, May 23, highlighting
the agency’s Fiscal Year 2018 budget proposal, including a televised State of
NASA address by acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot and Facebook Live virtual
tours of NASA’s 10 centers, where innovation is enabling exploration and
discovery.
Lightfoot will give a presentation at 12:30 p.m. EDT to NASA
employees at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington on FY2018 budget
highlights, setting the stage for the coming year at NASA and spotlighting the
past work that led to current achievements. This presentation will air live on
NASA Television and the agency’s website.
At 1:30 p.m., NASA's social media team will take visitors behind
the scenes for a virtual tour of NASA and a look at the cutting-edge work here
and on humanity's destiny in deep space. These Facebook Live events will be
hosted on each center's Facebook page and will run about 15 minutes each. The
following list of virtual tours includes times, centers and highlights of each
tour:
·
1:30 p.m.
-- Glenn
Research Center, in Cleveland, will host a tour of its Electric Propulsion
Lab, where the agency tests solar propulsion technologies that are critical to
powering spacecraft for NASA’s deep-space missions.
·
1:50 p.m.
-- Marshall
Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, will host a tour from a
Marshall test stand where structural loads testing is performed on parts of
NASA's Space Launch System rocket.
·
2:10 p.m.
-- Stennis
Space Center, in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, will take visitors on a tour
of their test stands to learn about rocket engine testing from their Test
Control Center.
·
2:30 p.m.
-- Armstrong
Flight Research Center, in Edwards, California, will host a tour from their
aircraft hangar and Simulator Lab to learn about NASA’s X-Planes program.
·
2:50 p.m.
-- Johnson
Space Center in Houston will take viewers on a virtual exploration
trip through the mockups of the International Space Station and inside the
agency’s deep-space exploration vehicle, the Orion spacecraft.
·
3:10 p.m.
-- Ames
Research Center, in California’s Silicon Valley, will bring viewers into
its Arc Jet Facility, a plasma wind tunnel used to simulate the extreme heat of
spacecraft atmospheric entry.
·
3:30 p.m. --
Kennedy Space
Center, in Florida, will bring visitors inside the Vehicle Assembly
Building to learn about how NASA is preparing for the first launch of America's
next big rocket, SLS.
·
3:50 p.m.
-- Langley
Research Center, in Hampton Virginia, will bring visitors inside its
14-by-22-foot wind tunnel, where aerodynamic projects are tested.
·
4:10 p.m.
-- Goddard
Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, will discuss the upcoming
United States total solar eclipse and host its tour from the Space Weather Lab,
a large multi-screen room where data from the sun is analyzed and studied.
·
4:30 p.m.
-- Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, will bring viewers to the
Spacecraft Assembly Facility to learn about robotic exploration of the solar
system.
Also on Tuesday, at 5 p.m. NASA’s acting Chief Financial Officer
Andrew Hunter will brief media on the agency’s 2018 budget proposal. To
participate in this briefing, media must contact Karen Northon in the NASA
Headquarters newsroom at 202-358-1540 or karen.northon@nasa.gov
no later than 4 p.m. Tuesday.
Audio of the media teleconference will be streamed live on NASA's
website at:
NASA budget information will be available online at noon Tuesday
at: