16-08-2008 NASA’s Golden Jubilee (Article 150)

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Simon Kenny
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16-08-2008 NASA’s Golden Jubilee (Article 150)

Post by Simon Kenny » Tue Dec 30, 2008 9:25 pm

NASA’s Golden Jubilee — 2008 ( Article 150)

In the fifty years of its existence, America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made an immense contribution to the development space exploration and to our knowledge of the cosmos, both near and far away. Its many spacecraft, from Pioneer to Hubble have, in the past 50 years, given us insights on the universe that were unimaginable only a few decades ago.

NASA was set up in 1958 to organise the fledgling American space program. Its brief was to set goals for the space program and organise the development and implementation of these goals. NASA was America’s response to the challenge of the Soviet Union, which had sent the first artificial satellite into space on October 4th 1957, followed by a second satellite on November 3rd carrying the first animal into orbit: the dog Laika. NASA’s first launch came shortly after its foundation in October 1958, with Pioneer I from Cape Canaveral. The modest payload included sensors to detect high-energy radiation above the Earth’s atmosphere. While Pioneer 1 never achieved it’s ultimate goal of studying ionising radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields and micrometeorites in the vicinity of the moon, it did set NASA on the way to greater achievements.

From the beginning, NASA focused on high profile programs to establish a human presence in space. The first was Project Mercury, which developed and tested the technology to launch a man into space and return him safely to earth. Though John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth in February 1962, he was only the third to do so after the Russians Yuri Gagarin in April and Gherman Titov in August, 1961. Having mastered the fundamentals of manned space flight, NASA then initiated Project Gemini, which built on the lessons of the Mercury program and developed rocket and support systems to carry two astronauts into space. The ten Gemini flights, launched during 1965 and 1966, were developed in the wake of President Kennedy’s promise in 1961: ‘before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth’. The project therefore had to develop ways of manoeuvring spacecraft in orbit and of docking with other spacecraft. These skills were essential for flights to the Moon.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of NASA was its Apollo Program, which culminated in humankind’s first steps on another world. Though there were six pairs of astronauts to land on the Moon, the ghostly shadow of that first man on our TV screens back on Earth remains the most memorable of them all. So too are his words as he stepped from his frail spaceship: ‘That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’. NASA had other great successes in its 50 year history, but none as awesome as Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the sands of the Moon.

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