I suspect the fact that Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth, started his career at the SAO [2] and worked at NRAO later. The other one is the extreme compactness of the runtime, and his chip designs that got "radiation hardened" versions. The RTX2010 was used in ESA's Philae/Rosetta mission [3].
[2] In Forth, The Early Days, Moore writes "At MIT [1958], John McCarthy taught an incredible course on LISP. That was my introduction to recursion, and to the marvelous variety of computer language. Wil Baden has noted that LISP is to Lambda Calculus as Forth is to Lukasewcleicz Postfix".
http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212211