The history of space travel.
On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy 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 even exist yet. With precision comparable to that of the finest watch that would launch a man to the moon, an unexplored celestial body that was 240,000 miles away traveling at more than 25 thousand miles per hour with equipment that would be necessary for propulsion, guide, control, communication. , food and survival, before the end of the decade (which was less than 8 years).
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 both by our own need to explore the moon and 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 fact for our national security.
But the real starting gun came in 1957 when the Russians launched Sputnik and, just a month later, they also put a dog into orbit. This was incredibly alarming to the Americans, since now the Russians were putting more than satellites in space and there too they could put nuclear weapons in space. Then the most damaging blow to American pride was in 1961 when the Russians had put a man in low orbit and he had circled the earth in less than 2 hours.
The United States quickly accelerated the pace of space exploration by over-speeding the testing process that ended in several disastrously failed rocket tests. However, we were finally able to get to second place when we released a man named Alan Shepard on a short suborbital flight. At the time, it was Project Mercury that controlled manned space activity. 7 military test pilots were selected to be part of this project and, in extension, the newly formed NASA.
On our sixth mission, the United States was finally able to get there 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 in the fact that the Gemini project did two manned space trips and there 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 additional vehicular activity or spacewalk (having a person outside the spacecraft). We were catching up with Russia quickly, as they had done their first spacewalk just two and a half months before the United States. We continue to gain more and more momentum. Between 1965 and 1966, 10 Gemini missions brought the United States on par with Russia and we began to break our own records. The best known event during Gemini 8 in which the first docking between two space vehicles occurred. Gemini 8 came incredibly close to completing the disaster when the two ships began to rotate. They were turning so fast that the crew almost fainted. 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.
America started looking for better rockets that could get us into space and then 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 transport the man faster than he had ever traveled before and it was also 100 times more powerful than the Redstone rocket that had launched Alan Shepard. Saturn was the beginning of the Apollo program.
We finally started scheduling the trip to the moon. We had been looking for a crew member since 1962. The man who was looking for the crew members was the only one of the original 7 test pilots who would never go into space (remember there were 7 members but only 6 flights).
The first major setback and tragedy in space exploration occurred in 1967 on Apollo 1 (or as Apollo 204 was called back then) when a flash fire destroyed the command capsule in a routine ground test. All 3 astronauts died, one of whom Virgil gust griffin, who was the 2nd American in space. Until then, NASA was somewhat reckless. It was discovered that we had not built the electrical system correctly, which in the oxygen-rich environment of the command pod was horrible. He showed NASA that it was a dangerous business.
The Apollo project started taking it a little slower by taking various unmanned tests and completely redesigning the command capsule. So we started work on Apollo 7 which did a long-term space reconnaissance. There was a lot of pressure on them after Apollo 1. But the whole project went absolutely perfectly. Then came Apollo 8-9-10, which paved the way for the famous Apollo 11.
4 days after its launch, the lunar module named Eagle by the crew was disconnected 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 Apollo’s ancestors and there were problems. Several times during the descent alarms sounded signaling to 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, 2000 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 about 30 seconds of fuel, was able to expertly lead the module into the sea of ​​tranquility. Whereupon the man took his first steps on another celestial body.
“A small step for man, a great step for humanity.”