Twenty years ago today, the first email message was sent from space to earth. The Houston Chronicle reported: “Electronic mail networks, the message medium of the information age, made their space-age debut Sunday aboard the shuttle Atlantis as part of an effort to develop a communications system for a space station… Astronauts Shannon Lucid and James Adamson conducted the first experiment with the e-mail system Sunday afternoon, exchanging a test message with Marcia Ivins, the shuttle communicator at Johnson Space Center… The messages follow a winding path from the shuttle to a satellite in NASA’s Tracking Data Relay Satellite System to the main TDRSS ground station in White Sands, N.M., back up to a commercial communications satellite, then down to Houston, where they enter one or more computer networks… The shuttle tests are part of a larger project to develop computer and communications systems for the space station Freedom, which the agency plans to assemble during the late 1990s.”

On July 1, 2011, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a speech at the National Press Club: “As a former astronaut and the current NASA Administrator, I’m here to tell you that American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we have laid the foundation for success — and failure is not an option.”