CONTENTS

• Summer 2025 Edition of News & Notes Explores Leadership and Critical Decision-Making
• Our Next Aerospace Latin America Seminar: Pedro Alonso Presents on July 10

Summer 2025 Edition of News & Notes Explores Leadership and Critical Decision-Making

In the Summer 2025 issue of the NASA History Office’s News & Notes newsletter, examples of leadership and critical decision-making in NASA’s history form the unifying theme.

FEATURED ARTICLES

• From the Chief Historian
• Shuttle-Centaur: Loss of Launch Vehicle Redundancy Leads to Discord
• 2025 NASA History Seminar Series: Aerospace Latin America
• A View into NASA's Response to the Apollo 1 Tragedy
• The Fight to Fund AgRISTARS
• The Hubble Space Telescope: The Right Project at the Right Time
• Appraisal: The Science and Art of Assessing Donations to the NASA Archives
• Orbit Shift: How 50 Pegasi b Helped Pull NASA Toward the Stars in the 1990s
• Four, Eight, Fourteen Days: Charles A. Berry, Gemini, and the Critical Steps to Living and Working in Space
• Imagining Space: The Life and Art of Robert McCall
• Inside the Archives: Biomedical Branch Files
• News from Around NASA
• Former JPL Space Historian Dies at 88
• Other Aerospace History News
• Upcoming Meetings

Read our Summer 2025 newsletter

Our Next Aerospace Latin America Seminar: Pedro Alonso Presents on July 10

“NASA in the Most Remote Area: The Laser Station and the Landing Strip on Easter Island during the 1980s”

Pedro Alonso (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Thursday, July 10 at 2:00 pm EDT / 1:00 pm CDT / 11:00 am PDT

In 1985 a group of architecture students from the University of Chile made up two scale papier-mâché models of a Moai—the emblematic and monolithic human figures carved on volcanic stone by the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island—to create a barricade in demonstration against General Augusto Pinochet’s intentions to allow the installation of a U.S. NASA base on the island. A mixture of art, activism and politics, their performance defied the dictatorial regime by ultimately burning the figures. In fact, during that period, several episodes of technological exchange between Chile and the United States took place when tracking stations and other facilities were installed all along the country. By discussing a wide array of objects and visual materials, this talk will explore how science and technology were imagined, designed, and built alongside the politics, as well as the associated artistic and visual cultures attached to the reception and adaptation of those technological artifacts intended for one of the most remote areas of the planet. 

Pedro Ignacio Alonso holds a PhD in architecture from the Architectural Association in the United Kingdom and heads the PhD program in Architecture and Urban Studies at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow at Princeton University (2015–2016) and a resident architect at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (2019). With Hugo Palmarola, he received the Silver Lion for the Chilean Pavilion Monolith Controversies at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014), which is now a permanent exhibit at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile.

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