The history of space travel.
President Kennedy, on September 12, 1962, gave a speech in which he promised that we would build a rocket the size of a football field out of various metal alloys, many of which did not yet exist. With an accuracy comparable to that of the best watch that would launch a man to the moon, an unexplored celestial body that was 240,000 miles away and was traveling at more than 25,000 miles per hour carrying the equipment that would be necessary for propulsion, guidance , control, communication. , feeding and survival, before the end of the decade (which was less than 8 years away).
Something like that sounded too premature. Especially for a country that had less than half an hour of manned space travel. But we were motivated as much by our own need to explore the moon as by the more realistic fact that the Russians were far more experienced and moving alarmingly fast. We were at the height of the cold war, and the fact that the Russians possessed more space technology was an alarming development in our national security.
But the real kick-off happened in 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik and then just 1 month later they also put a dog into orbit. This was incredibly alarming to the Americans, as now the Russians were putting more than just satellites in space, and therefore could also put nuclear weapons in space. Then the most damaging blow to American pride was in 1961 when the Russians put a man into low orbit and he circled the Earth in less than 2 hours.
The United States rapidly accelerated the pace of space exploration and over-speeded the testing process, resulting in several disastrously failed rocket tests. However, we were finally able to make it to second place when we freed a man named Alan Shepard on a short flight into underwater orbit. At that time, it was the Mercury project that controlled manned space activity. 7 military test pilots were selected to be part of this project and, by extension, the newly formed NASA.
On our 6th mission, the United States was finally able to participate in about 2 days of space travel on our own. Then after this came the Gemini project, the biggest difference between the Mercury project and the Gemini project was the fact that the Gemini project made two manned space trips and therefore they were named after the Latin word for twins. . It acted as the connection between Mercury and Apollo and had many members of both.
Gemini 4 had the first American EVA which was called extravehicular activity or spacewalking (having a person outside of the spacecraft). We caught up with Russia quickly, as they had done their first spacewalk just two and a half months before the United States. We keep building more and more momentum. Between 1965 and 1966, 10 Gemini missions brought the United States equal to Russia, and we began to break our own records. The best known event occurred during Gemini 8, in which the first coupling between two spacecraft occurred. Gemini 8 came incredibly close to total disaster when the two spacecraft began to spin. They were spinning so fast that the crew nearly passed out. The separation made the twist even worse. The two crew members were future Apollo members David Scott and the much better known Neil Armstrong as captain.
The United States began looking for better rockets that could take us into space than Titan rockets. We soon found our answer when we started building Saturn rockets. It was the most powerful engine ever created by mankind. Once activated, it would become brighter than the sun. It would carry man faster than he had ever traveled before and was also 100 times more powerful than the Redstone rocket that Alan Shepard had launched. The Saturn was the dawn of the Apollo program.
We finally started planning the trip to the moon. We had been looking for a crew member since 1962. The man looking for the crew members was the only man out of the original 7 test pilots who never went into space (remember there were 7 members but only 6 flights).
The first major setback and tragedy of space exploration occurred in 1967 on Apollo 1 (or as Apollo 204 was then called) when a flash fire destroyed the command capsule in a routine ground test. All 3 astronauts died, one of which was Virgil Gust Griffin, who was the 2nd American in space. Until then, NASA was somewhat reckless. It was discovered that we had not done the electrical system correctly which in the oxygen rich environment of the command pod was horrible. NASA proved that it was a dangerous business.
The Apollo project began to slow things down a bit by conducting several unmanned tests and completely redesigning the command capsule. So we started working on Apollo 7 which did long-term space reconnaissance. There was a lot of pressure on them after Apollo 1. But the whole project went absolutely perfect. Then came the Apollo 8-9-10 which paved the way for the famous Apollo 11.
4 days after launch, the lunar module named Eagle by the crew separated from the command module named Columbia and began its descent to the surface. This part of the mission was the most difficult because all other aspects of the mission had already been repeatedly tested by the ancestors of Apollo and there were problems. Alarms sounded several times during the descent, alerting the crew that a computer overload was occurring. However, the command accurately judged that this would not affect the landing and ordered them to continue. Then, 2,000 feet above the moon, they discovered that the eagle’s autopilot was going to land them inside a rocky crater. Then, just 300 feet above Neil, he took manual control and with only around 30 seconds of fuel, he was able to expertly get the module into the sea of tranquility. In which man took his first steps on another celestial body.
“One small step for man, one giant step for humanity.”
