Throughout the history of space exploration, NASA and other parties have constantly looked to the Minecraft community for aide with developing their various vehicles, probes and rovers. One of the most famous examples of Redstone engineers playing an integral role in NASA’s development of their things, the Mars rover Curiosity, was actually made using a variety of Minecraft Redstone tutorials as guides on how to make certain components function. For example, Curiosity’s power source is actually just a heavily compacted repeating pulse redstone circuit. While using a repeating pulse circuit may seem like common sense, NASA actually made some previous blunders when designing methods of supplying power to these rovers. For example Opportunity (Rest in pease) actually got his power through a daylight sensor, that sent a signal to his other components. This proved to be a problem for Oppy, as if light levels get below 15, he would die. And die he did. This led NASA to turn to other more advanced techniques.


NASA has also employed techniques designed by redstone engineers in other facets of their operations as well. It’s a true (Albeit little known fact) that NASA’s supercomputers actually take heavily after Legomasta99’s minecraft computer designs. And the space shuttles were constructed as efficiently was they were because the materials they were made out of were all smelted using a massive array of 16 furnace super smelters. Since NASA has access to snapshot builds, they were actually able to make the smelters with blast furnaces, which allows for them to make their materials at an alarming rate.


Despite NASA’s redstone mastery, there are still some conspiracy theories floating around that NASA may not be nearly as truthful about their methods as they would have us believe. It’s somewhat widely believed that someone at NASA has received operator permissions, and has been secretly using command blocks to speed up the process of launching things into space. There’s a lot of evidence but no exact proof. One of the more often cited examples was NASA’s seeming use of items that aren’t in the creative or survival inventory, as well as the fact that they appear to also be utilizing blocks and items only available in the Education Edition of the game. One of the most famous examples of this apparent cheating would be the famous image of Buzz Aldrin standing on the moon. It’s said that if you zoom in on his helmet, you can see an item called a “Camera” reflected in his helmet. The Camera is an items that was intended for taking screenshots, and never made an appearance in the Java editions of the game, however they did exist in pre-0.3.0 versions of Minecraft PE. They were however, recently made a comeback in the education edition, but it cannot be gained through survival means. This would indicate that the game was hacked to allow for items that couldn’t generally be obtained through normal means. The theory goes even deep this than this, but I digress because I don’t believe it.


Overall, some naysayers may claim that NASA is full of hacks who rely on other people’s hard work with redstone for their own goals, but I beg to differ. NASA took other redstone designs, and they perfected them. They’ve managed to condense massive redstone builds down to incredibly small sizes. Smaller than any minecraft youtuber has ever managed. Therefore, I truly believe that NASA is doing some of the most important redstone work to date, and without them we wouldn’t be nearly as advanced in our techniques as we are today.