![]() ![]() His space flight lasted one hour and forty-eight minutes.Ī month later, on the morning of May fifth, American Navy pilot Alan Shepard crawled into his little Mercury spacecraft. On April twelfth, nineteen-sixty one, he orbited the Earth one time in the Vostok One spacecraft. But the animal survived the launch and the landing in the ocean.īut before NASA could send an astronaut into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first person to travel in space. A Mercury spacecraft carried a chimpanzee named Ham on a seven hundred kilometer flight over the Atlantic Ocean. The final test flight was made at the end of January, nineteen sixty-one. Men would fly the Mercury spacecraft only after it was proved safe. Those test flights did not carry astronauts. The first test flights began later that year. They immediately began training for space flight. NASA announced the seven astronauts it had chosen on April ninth, nineteen fifty-nine. The Army and Air Force built the Redstone, Jupiter and Atlas rockets. The McDonnell Company designed and built the spacecraft. And money was needed - thousands of millions of dollars.Ĭongress approved the money. Thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians and other workers were needed. But making it happen was not a simple job. The space vehicle would return to Earth and land in the ocean.Īstronauts would be chosen for the program from the best military test pilots who had education in science or engineering. It would use one of several dependable military rockets to launch a small, one-man spacecraft. Project Mercury was the plan for doing this. NASA's most important job was to send an American into space and return him safely to Earth. The American space agency opened for business October first, nineteen fifty-eight. Today we finish the story of the first American program to send a person into space. The planet’s atmosphere is unbreathably thin and lacks a global magnetic field, which means that human residents would be inundated with cosmic and UV rays.And this is Shirley Griffith with the VOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS. The truth is that Mars is a place irredeemably hostile to human life. What about the prospects of humans colonizing or even conducting research on Mars? This has the flavor of popular science fiction. More likely, they’ll be like other science projects sent aloft on the space shuttle, which Weinberg acerbically dismissed as having “the flavor of projects done for a high school science talent contest.” If so, however, they would be conducted by experienced scientists, not a 71-year-old Dayton real estate man. Perhaps these projects will have genuine scientific value. (Connor’s firm says the price tag reported by the Post is incorrect, but won’t divulge the real figure.) Larry Connor, an Ohio apartment tycoon who put up a reported $55 million for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station, ferried there by Musk’s SpaceX, told the Washington Post he’s “collaborating with the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic on research projects” and will give classes on his experience to students at a Dayton charter school. The vanity projects of the billionaire astronauts are endowed with a science-y veneer. (One of the authors was Peter Navarro, then of UC Irvine, whose later promotion of a useless remedy for COVID-19 should put his expertise in perspective.) They didn’t mention any specific economic returns, brilliant or otherwise, perhaps because they couldn’t identify any that would not have been produced by an uncrewed moon program. Two Trump advisors writing just before the 2016 election promoted the notion of renewed crewed exploration by citing the “ brilliant returns for our economy, our security, and our sense of national destiny” produced by past investments in space exploration. But the Hubble could just as easily have been launched by an uncrewed mission - indeed, as Riccardo Giacconi, the former director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, estimated, doing so would have allowed seven Hubbles to be launched for the same price as the single shuttle-launched telescope.Ĭrewed space missions are customarily justified by the advances in science and technological know-how thrown off by the space race. ![]() One example of the wastefulness of crewed missions is the Hubble Space Telescope, which was placed into orbit in 1990 by the space shuttle. 28, 2017, address to Congress in which he hinted at a resumption of crewed space exploration, the public obviously considers human participants to be indispensable, so much so that a loss of life can almost destroy a space program, as happened with the space shuttle program after two human catastrophes. ![]()
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