Space historian and journalist Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon and A Passion for Mars, designed and teaches NASA Missions for the Academy. Chaikin, who served as a summer intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the Viking program's first Mars landings, has seen the hard work of space exploration up close. One of the things that excites me so much in telling the story of space exploration is that it's not just the experience of exploration and what we discover. Those are obviously at the top of the list, but right up there with that is the engineering ingenuity and passion on display in every one of those exploration missions, he says. That is one of those things that makes space exploration so inspiring. It's really an example of what's best in us as human beings.