The NASA people are linked to Amiga by the fact that NASA was an Amiga customer back in the days of the big C. They needed machines that could do lots of maths at the same time. Windoze machines couldn't multitask well and Apple refused to give NASA enough of the hardware spec for them (NASA) to make the custom boards they needed. The rest is history and was well covered in an A.U.I article years ago.
