Hundreds of FREE space wallpapers from NASA

Forget Yuri Gagarin. Joe Kittinger was actually the first man in space. And then he jumped. From nearly 20 miles up, his fall took over 13 minutes and exceeded the speed of sound. As a United States Air Force pilot who pioneered balloon jumps from the edge of space. Among his many exploits, he jumped from an open balloon gondola at 102,800 feet (over 31 km) – the highest a human being has ever traveled in an unpowered flight. He plummeted toward Earth for almost 26 km before his main chute opened, in the longest free fall in history. At one point he radioed back, "There is a hostile sky above me. Man may live in space, but he will never conquer it." A famous and funny incident occured in this flight when the decision was made to terminate the flight, and Kittinger received the orders from the ground control center he was not very happy with the decision, and replied them using the morse code his infamous phrase "Come and get me". After the flight he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. The International Space Station is shown here with assembly completed in early 2003. The new station is the largest and most complex peacetime international collaboration ever undertaken. It also will  be the largest spacecraft ever built. Apollo and Space Stations (1958-1973) Project Mercury had hardly begun when NASA and the congress looked beyond it, to space stations and a permanent human presence in space. Space stations were seen as the next step after humans reached orbit. In 1959, A NASA committee recommended that a space station be established before a trip to the Moon, and the U.S. House of Representatives Space Committee declared a space station a logical follow-on to Project Mercury. In April 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space in the Vostok 1 spacecraft. President John F. Kennedy reviewed many options for a response to prove that the U.S. would not yield space to the Soviet Union, including a space station, but a man on the Moon won out. Getting to the Moon required so much work that the U.S. and Soviet Union were starting the race about even. In addition, the Moon landing was an unequivocal achievement, while a space station could take many different forms. Space station studies continued within NASA and the aerospace industry, aided by the heightened interest in space flight attending Apollo. In 1964, seeds were planted for Skylab, a post-Apollo first-generation space station. Wernher von Braun, who became the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, was instrumental in Skylab’s development. By 1968, a space station was NASA’s leading candidate for a post-Apollo goal. In 1969, the year Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, the agency proposed a 100-person permanent space station, with assembly completion scheduled for 1975. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union endeavored to demonstrate their power. The space race served as an opportunity for the two nations to showcase their scientific and technological capabilities. AmidstPropaganda, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. competed for superiority in space as they constantly tried to top each other. During World War II, Germany attacked Great Britain from across the English Channel using V-2 rockets developed by their brilliant rocket scientists and engineers. Among these was the notable Wernher von Braun who, along with many other scientists, surrendered to the United States at the end of the war. Wernher von Braun had a major role during the space race, leading the teams that developed some of the United States' rockets, including the Jupiter, Redstone, and Saturn rockets. Meanwhile, many of the other German rocket engineers had decided to work for the Soviet Union at the end of the war. Both the United States and the Soviet Union benefited from the expertise of these German rocket scientists in their quest for space superiority. Due to the fear of burn-up in reentry and contamination by space germs, the first space flights planned were in the form of unmanned satellite launches. The Soviet Union threw down the gauntlet when on October 4, 1957, Sputnik I was launched into space as the first orbiting satellite. A month later, on November 3, the Soviet Union set another record when it launched Sputnik II with the first living creature in space: a dog named Laika. On January 31 of the following year, the United States countered with Explorer I, its first satellite. In 1960, the U.S. began its Corona program, a recently declassified satellite reconnaissance program developed by the CIA and the Air Force, which returned photographs of the U.S.S.R. and China. On July 29, 1957, in recognition of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year, the White House announced that the U.S. intended to launch satellites by the spring of 1958. This became known as Project Vanguard. On July 31, the Soviets announced that they intended to launch a satellite by the fall of 1957. On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1 into space, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, thus beginning the Space Race and making the USSR the first space power. A month later, the USSR successfully orbited Sputnik 2, with the first living passenger, a dog named Laika. In the Soviet Union, a country recovering from a devastating war, the launch of Sputnik and the following program of space exploration were met with great interest from the public. It was also important and encouraging for Soviet citizens to see the proof of technical prowess in the new era. NASA - US government agency for space flight and aeronautical research, founded in 1958 by the National Aeronautics and Space Act. Its headquarters are in Washington, DC, and its main installations include the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island in Florida, the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA's early planetary and lunar programmes included the Pioneer probes, from 1958, which gathered data for the later crewed missions, and the Apollo  project, which took the first astronauts to the Moon in Apollo 11 on 16–24 July 1969. NASA launched the first space shuttle in 1981. In the early 1990s, the agency moved towards lower-budget missions, such as the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous craft and the Lunar Prospector. It also established a New Millennium Program to identify, develop, and fly advanced technologies at lower costs. The programme's first launch was Deep Space 1 in 1998, and its Space Technology 6 (ST6) series has been developing new technologies for future flights. A notable success was the Mars Exploration Rover mission which in January 2004 landed two rovers on that planet. However, the break-up of the Columbia shuttle on 1 February 2003, killing all seven astronauts, led to all shuttles being grounded until 2005, as well as an extensive investigation and upgrade of safety. In January 2004, US president George W Bush announced plans to send astronauts back to the Moon in 2020 and later to Mars.  The first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity and the first to reach the Moon. The spacecraft was sphere-shaped. Five antennae extended from one hemisphere. Instrument ports also protruded from the surface of the sphere. There were no propulsion systems on the spacecraft itself. The spacecraft also included various metallic emblems with the Soviet coat of arms. At a distance of 113,000 km from Earth, a large (1 kg) cloud of sodium gas was released by the spacecraft. This glowing orange trail of gas, with the brightness of a sixth-magnitude star, allowed astronomers to track the spacecraft. It also served as an experiment on the behavior of gas in outer space. The spacecraft contained radio equipment, a tracking transmitter, and telemetering system, five different sets of scientific devices for studying interplanetary space, including a magnetometer, Geiger counter, scintillation counter, and micrometeorite detector, and other equipment. The measurements obtained during the missions provided new data on the Earth's radiation belt and outer space, including the discovery that the Moon had no magnetic field and that a solar wind, a strong flow of ionized plasma emanating from the Sun, streamed through interplanetary space. In all, six piloted missions were orbited, between 1961 and 1963, under the 'Vostok' programme name. VostokThe Vostok spacecraft shares its roots with Sergei Korolyov's 'Zenit' recoverable satellite. Several versions of Zenit have existed over the years and it still flies orbital missions as the re-entry vehicle of the 'Cometa' recoverable satellite, and under the 'Photon' and 'Bion' labels. The Vostok spacecraft development programme included several orbital flights before Gagarin went into orbit, including a full dress rehearsal with dummy cosmonaut. Following Laika (Sputnik 2) into space were several dogs as occupants of the Vostok development missions - the Korabl Sputniks or 'Spaceship Satellites'. Unlike with Laika, the object was to return the dogs from their missions, though this aim was not always achieved. Through the 1950's, the Soviet Union fired an increasingly ambitious series of vertical probe rockets from the Kapustin Yar launch site with adapted military rockets, apparently ranging from modified versions of the German V-2 on up through the medium range surface-to-surface missile which the Western powers call the SS-3 or Shyster. Shyster was the immediate forerunner of the SS-4 or Sandal, famous for its involvement in the Cuban missile crisis 'and for launching the small Kosmos payloads from Kapustin Yar and Plesetsk. While the United States was making tests with monkeys and apes, the Russians concentrated on dogs, and occasionally sent smaller animals. By 1952, the Soviet Union claimed to have sent 12 animals up in 18 flights to altitudes of 96 km. The effort had improved to the point that in the spring of 1957, a single rocket with a payload of 2,195 kg had carried five dogs. That June the Russians announced that dogs would participate in the Soviet part of the IGY program. On August 27, 1958 , the dogs Belyanka and Pestraya were flown to 452 km in a payload of 1,690 kg. On July 2, 1959 , in a payload of 2,000 kg, Otvazhnaya and another dog were flown to 241 km. On July 10, 1959 , Otvazhnaya and several other dogs were flown to 211 km in a payload of 2,200 kg. Otvazhnaya made yet another flight on June 15,1960 , this time accompanied by another dog and a rabbit. This rocket had a payload of 2,100 kg and was flown to 221 km. These and other repetitive flights gave opportunities for testing a variety of life support component systems and for linking the behavior of animals, even if briefly, to the hazards of rocket acceleration, radiation, micrometeorites, weightlessness and recovery. The Voskhod 3KD spacecraft had an inflatable airlock extended in orbit. Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov donned a space suit and left the spacecraft while the other cosmonaut of the two-man crew, Pavel Belyayev, remained inside. Leonov began his spacewalk 90 minutes into the mission at the end of the first orbit. Cosmonaut Leonov's spacewalk lasted 12 minutes and 9 seconds (08:34:51–08:47:00hrs UTC), beginning over north-central Africa (northern Sudan/southern Egypt), and ending over eastern Siberia. Voskhod 2 spacecraft The Voskhod 2 spacecraft is a Vostok spacecraft with a backup, solid fuel retrorocket, attached atop the descent module. The ejection seat was removed and two seats were added, (at a 90-degree angle relative to the Vostok crew seats position). An inflatable exterior airlock was also added to the descent module opposite the entry hatch. After use, the airlock was jettisoned. There was no provision for crew escape in the event of a launch or landing emergency. A solid fuel braking rocket was also added to the parachute lines to provide for a softer landing at touchdown. This was necessary because, unlike the Vostok, the crew lands with the Voskhod descent module. Though Leonov was able to complete his spectacular space walk successfully, both that feat and the overall mission were plagued with problems. After his 12 minutes and 9 seconds outside the Voskhod, Leonov found that his suit had stiffened to the point where he could not re-enter the airlock. Leonov worked around this by allowing some of his suit's pressure to bleed off, making it easier for him to bend the joints. The two crew members subsequently experienced difficulty in sealing the hatch properly, followed by a troublesome re-entry in which malfunction of the automatic landing system forced the use of its manual backup. The manual re-entry culminated in a landing well outside of the flight's intended landing zone in an inhospitable and heavily-wooded part of the Ural Mountains, forcing the two cosmonauts to spend a night surrounded by wolves before they could be rescued by their recovery team. Luna 9 was an unmanned space mission of the Soviet Union's Luna program. On February 3, 1966 the Luna 9 spacecraft was the first spacecraft to achieve a lunar  soft landing and to transmit photographic data to Earth Earth also known as the Earth or Terra is the planet on which we live, the third planet outward from the Sun. It is the largest of the solar system's terrestrial planets, and the only planetary body that modern science confirms as harbouring life. The pla. The automatic lunar station that achieved the soft landing weighed 99 kg. It was a hermetically sealed container with radio equipment, a program timing device, heat control systems, scientific apparatus, power sources, and a television system. The Luna 9 payload was carried to Earth orbit by an A-2-E vehicle and then conveyed toward the Moon by a fourth stage rocket that separated itself from the payload. Flight apparatus separated from the payload shortly before Luna 9 landed. After landing in the Ocean of Storms on February 3, 1966, the four petals, which formed the spacecraft, opened outward and stabilized the spacecraft on the lunar surface. Spring-controlled antennas assumed operating positions, and the television camera rotating mirror system, which operated by revolving and tilting, began a photographic survey of the lunar environment. Seven radio sessions, totaling 8 hours and 5 minutes, were transmitted as were three series of TV pictures. When assembled, the photographs provided a panoramic view of the nearby lunar surface. The pictures included views of nearby rocks and of the horizon 1.4 km away from the spacecraft. With this mission, the Soviets accomplished another spectacular first in the space race, the first survivable landing of a human made object on another celestial body. Luna 9 was the twelfth attempt at a soft-landing by the Soviets; it was also the first deep space probe built by the Lavochkin design bureau, which ultimately would design and build almost all Soviet (and Russian) lunar and interplanetary spacecraft. All operations prior to landing occurred without fault, and the 58-centimeter spheroid ALS capsule landed on the Moon at 18:45:30 UT on 3 February 1966 west of the Reiner and Marius craters in the Ocean of Storms (at 7°8' north latitude and 64°22' west longitude). Approximately 5 minutes after touchdown, Luna 9 began transmitting data to Earth, but it was 7 hours (after the Sun climbed to 7° elevation) before the probe began sending the first of nine images (including five panoramas) of the surface of the Moon. These were the first images sent from the surface of another planetary body. The radiation detector, the only scientific instrument on board, measured a dosage of 30 millirads per day. Perhaps the most important discovery of the mission was determining that a foreign object would not simply sink into the lunar dust, that is, that the ground could support a heavy lander. Last contact with the spacecraft was at 22:55 UT on 6 February 1966. Colonel Vladimir Komarov, 40, is the first known victim of a space flight. He was an experienced cosmonaut, on his second flight, and had completed all his experiments successfully before returning to Earth. But within seconds of landing, just after he re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, the strings of the parachute intended to slow his descent apparently became tangled. The spaceship hurtled to the ground from four miles up. It is likely that Colonel Komarov was killed instantly on impact. A message of condolence from the Communist Party in Moscow described him as "a loyal son of our motherland and a courageous explorer of space." He has been decorated posthumously with a second Gold Star for heroism, and his ashes will be buried at the Kremlin wall - one of the highest honours accorded to a Soviet citizen. News of the death of Colonel Komarov was greeted with regret and concern in the United States. The head of the US space programme, James Webb, called for greater cooperation in space exploration. The team of 47 American astronauts working at Houston in Texas sent a telegram of condolence to their Russian rivals. The announcement from Moscow gave few details surrounding events leading up to the disaster, and there remain a number of mysteries surrounding the last moments of the doomed flight. The Soyuz 1 is known to be a new and heavier type of spacecraft, built as part of the Soviet attempt to land a man on the Moon, and Colonel Komarov was thought to be testing it when the disaster happened. Correspondents in Moscow had indications that all was not well with the flight from as early as yesterday, when earlier reports on Moscow Radio suddenly stopped and there was no mention of the space flight for nearly 13 hours. Experts have questioned why Colonel Komarov did not use an ejection system to get out of the spacecraft. The cosmonaut was also known to have suffered from heart problems. Late in the afternoon of January 31, 1971, NASA Apollo 14 was launched for the third trip to the moon. Alan Shephard and Edgar Mitchell were to walk on the moon, and Stuart Roosa would  remain in the command module orbiting the moon. Roosa, a former U.S. Forest Service smoke jumper, carried in his personal kit a very interesting cargo: hundreds of seeds of a variety of tree species, part of a joint NASA-USFS project. These seeds would ultimately end up as Moon Trees, many of which are still thriving here on earth. This project began when Ed Cliff, then Chief of the Forest Service, realized that Stuart Roosa had been chosen for the Apollo 14 Mission to the moon. Cliff had known Roosa when he was a smoke jumper. He contacted Roosa about the possibility of taking some tree seeds into space. Another Forest Service employee named Stan Krugman was named to head the project. Krugman decided that five species of trees would be used: Loblolly Pine, Sycamore, Sweetgum, Redwood, and Douglas Fir. Roosa ended up with about 500 seeds, each species in separate containers, all of which he had with him during the flight and orbiting around the moon. Control seeds were also kept on earth for later comparison testing. Upon return to earth, the seeds were unfortunately mixed during the decontamination procedures, and the viability of them was questioned. However, this fear was unfounded as most of the Moon Tree seeds germinated at two different Forest Service stations. There were about living 450 seedlings. Most were distributed in 1975 and 1976 to state forestry groups to be planted in conjunction with the nation's bicentennial celebrations. Some of the trees were given other countries, including Brazil, Switzerland and Japan. Mariner 9 was the first Mars orbiter, arriving there on November 13, 1971. After waiting out a planet-encircling dust storm, it proceeded to photo-map the entire planet, returning our first complete look at Mars' diverse geology. It had two television cameras, one wide-angle and one narrow-angle. The black dots you see on the image below are reseaux, which were permanent marks on the faceplate of the camera. These markings were intended to allow the Mariner 9 camera team to correct for geometric distortion intrinsic to the camera; many other '60s and '70s-era spacecraft cameras, notably the Voyagers, also had reseau markings. The Mariner 9 spacecraft was built on an octagonal magnesium frame, 45.7 cm deep and 138.4 cm across a diagonal. Four solar panels, each 215 x 90 cm, extended out from the top of the frame. Each set of two solar panels spanned 6.89 meters from tip to tip. Also mounted on the top of the frame were two propulsion tanks, the manuever engine, a 1.44 m long low gain antenna mast and a parabolic high gain antenna. A scan platform was mounted on the bottom of the frame, on which were attached the mutually bore-sighted science instruments (wide- and narrow-angle TV cameras, infrared radiometer, ultraviolet spectrometer, and infrared interferometer spectrometer). The overall height of the spacecraft was 2.28 m. The launch mass was 997.9 kg, of which 439.1 kg were expendables. The science instrumentation had a total mass of 63.1 kg. The electronics for communications and command and control were housed within the frame. Spacecraft power was provided by a total of 14,742 solar cells which made up the 4 solar panels with a total area of 7.7 square meters. The solar panels could produce 800 W at Earth and 500 W at Mars. Power was stored in a 20 amp-hr nickel-cadmium battery. Propulsion was provided by a gimbaled engine capable of 1340 N thrust and up to 5 restarts. The propellant was monomethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. Two sets of 6 attitude control nitrogen jets were mounted on the ends of the solar panels. Attitude knowledge was provided by a Sun sensor, a Canopus star tracker, gyroscopes, an inertial reference unit, and an accelerometer. Passive thermal control was achieved through the use of louvers on the eight sides of the frame and thermal blankets. Spacecraft control was through the central computer and sequencer which had an onboard memory of 512 words. The command system was programmed with 86 direct commands, 4 quantitative commands, and 5 control commands. Data was stored on a digital reel-to-reel tape recorder. The 168 meter 8-track tape could store 180 million bits recorded at 132 kbits/s. Playback could be done at 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1 kbit/s using two tracks at a time. Telecommunications were via dual S-band 10 W/20 W transmitters and a single receiver through the high gain parabolic antenna, the medium gain horn antenna, or the low gain omnidirectional antenna. The Voyager probes were originally conceived as part of the Mariner program, and designated Mariner 11 and Mariner 12, respectively. They were then moved into a separate program named Mariner Jupiter-Saturn, later retitled Voyager because it was felt that the probes' designs had moved sufficiently far from the Mariner family that they merited a separate name.  Voyager is essentially a scaled-back version of the Grand Tour program of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Grand Tour's plan was to send a pair of probes to fly by all the outer planets; it was scaled back because of budget cuts. However, in the end, Voyager fulfilled all the Grand Tour flyby objectives except for Pluto, which at the time was considered a planet by the IAU. Of the pair, Voyager 2 was launched first. Its trajectory was designed to take advantage of an unusually convenient alignment of the planets allowing the inclusion of Uranus and Neptune fly bys in the probe's mission. Voyager 1 was launched after its sister probe, but on a faster trajectory which enabled it to reach Jupiter and Saturn sooner at the consequence of not visiting the outer planets. In the 1990s, Voyager 1 overtook the slower traveling Pioneer 10 to become the man-made object most distant from Earth in the universe. It will keep that record until such time as mankind develops newer, radically-faster forms of space propulsion than are currently known—even the faster (at launch) New Horizons probe will not outrace it, since the final speed of New Horizons (after maneuvering within the solar system) will be less than the current speed of Voyager 1. Voyager 1 and Pioneer 10 are also the most widely-separated man-made objects in the universe, because they are traveling in roughly opposite directions from the Sun (and each other). Periodic contact has been maintained with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to monitor conditions in the outer expanses of the solar system. The crafts' radioactive power sources are still producing electrical energy, fueling hopes of locating the solar system's heliopause. In late 2003, Voyager 1 began sending data that seemed to indicate it had crossed the termination shock, but interpretations of this data are in dispute. It is now believed that the termination shock was crossed in December 2004, with the heliopause an unknown distance ahead.

Skylab (1973-1974) In May 1973, the U.S. launched the Skylab space station atop a Saturn V rocket similar to those that took astronauts to the Moon. The rocket’s third stage was modified to become an orbital workshop and living quarters for three person crews. Non-reusable Apollo spacecraft originally designed for Moon missions ferried astronauts to and from the station. Skylab hosted three different crews for stays of 28, 56, and 84 days. Skylab astronauts conducted medical tests and studied micro-gravity’s influence on fluid and material properties. The crews also made astronomical, solar, and Earth observations. Long-duration microgravity research begun on Skylab will continue and be refined on the International Space Station. Skylab proved that humans could live and work in space for extended periods. The station also demonstrated the importance of human involvement in construction and upkeep of orbital assets–the first Skylab crew performed emergency space walks to free a solar array jammed during the station’s launch. Skylab was not designed for resupply, re-fuelling, or independent re-boost. When the last Skylab crew headed home in February 1974, NASA proposed sending the Space Shuttle to boost Skylab to a higher orbit or even to refurbish and reuse the station. But greater than expected solar activity expanded Earth’s atmosphere, hastening Skylab’s fall from orbit, and shuttle development fell behind schedule. Skylab re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in 1979. The next level in the space race was the sending of a human into orbit around the earth. While the U.S. space program was kept fairly public, the Soviet Union continued in secrecy. The U.S. began its Mercury program with an unmanned 18 minute flight on January 31, 1961 that carried Ham the chimpanzee. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union went forward with its Vostok (East) program. The first human fatality of the space race occured on March 23, 1961 when Valentin V. Bondarenko, a cosmonaut trainee, died in a pressure chamber fire that was covered up by Soviet officials. Despite this tragedy, the U.S.S.R. once again gained the upper hand in the space race. On April 12, Yuri Alekseyvich Gagarin became the first human in space when he completed one orbit in a 108 minute space flight aboard Vostok I. Later, in June 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. The United States began to catch up when Alan B. Shepard, Jr. flew in a fifteen-minute suborbital flight on May 5. In another suborbital flight on July 21, 1961 by Virgil "Gus" Ivan Grissom, the hatch on the capsule was blown off too soon after landing in the water. Although the capsule sank, Virgil Grissom was rescued. Finally, on February 20, 1962, John H. Glenn, Jr. orbited the earth three times in under five hours. Upon reentry, a problem developed when it was discovered that the capsule's heat shield was not locked into position. Luckily, the heat shield stayed in position and John H. Glenn, Jr. returned home safely as a national hero. The last Mercury mission carried L. Gordon Cooper, Jr. for 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds in twenty-two orbits. The next round of competition involved multiperson flights. The United States announced its Gemini program of two-person capsules in 1961. On the other side of the world, Soviet engineers worked hastily to modify their Vostok capsules for their Voskhod (Sunrise) program, eliminating some safety features, such as ejection seats, in order to accomodate three people. The race continued. Voskhod I became the first multiperson capsule, launching on October 12, 1964 with Vladimir M. Komarov, Konstantin P. Feoktistov, and Boris B. Yegorov aboard. They were also the first to land their capsule on the ground. And in March 1965, Alexei A. Leonov made the first "walk" in space. Gemini 3, launched on March 23, 1965, was the first manned, multiperson spaceflight of the United States. With Gemini 4, which took off on June 3, Edward H. White II earned his status as the first American to walk in space, traveling 6000 miles. In December, the Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 spacecraft were manuevered to within one foot of each other. On March 16, 1966, the world's first space docking was performed by the pilots of Gemini 8, Neil A. Armstrong and David R. Scott, who connected with an Agena rocket. The United States and Soviet Union now went ahead with their plans to achieve the final goal in the space race: landing a person on the moon. The U.S. dubbed their program Apollo while the U.S.S.R. entitled theirs Soyuz (Union). Test flights of both programs encountered tragedy. On January 27, 1967, during preparations for a low earth orbit flight, a fire inside the highly oxygenated, sealed cabin of the first manned Apollo mission resulted in the deaths of astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee. On April 23, 1967, the parachute failed on Soyuz I as it was returning to earth. The crash killed the sole pilot of the mission, Vladimar M. Komarov. Aware of Soviet preparations for a manned lunar fly-by, NASA launched Apollo 8, the first manned expedition to the moon, on December 21, 1968. Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William A. Anders orbited the moon and made observations. The legendary Apollo 11 mission, carrying Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins, began with its launch on July 16, 1969 aboard a Saturn V rocket. After entering lunar orbit, the Lunar Module (Eagle), with Armstrong and Aldrin, separated from the Command/Service Module (Columbia) and began its landing. At 4:17 PM on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module landed on a lunar plain known as the Sea of Tranquility with an announcement by Armstrong: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." At 10:39 PM, the hatch of the Lunar Module opened. At 10:56, Neil Armstrong became the first person to step on the moon with these infamous words: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." The moon is about 238,900 miles (384,000 km) from Earth on average. At its closest approach (the lunar perigee) the moon is 221,460 miles (356,410 km) from the Earth. At its farthest approach (its apogee) the moon is 252,700 miles (406,700 km) from the Earth. The moon revolves around the Earth in about one month (27 days 8 hours). It rotates around its own axis in the same amount of time. The same side of the moon always faces the Earth; it is in a synchronous rotation with the Earth. The Moon's orbit is expanding over time as it slows down (the Earth is also slowing down as it loses energy). For example, a billion years ago, the Moon was much closer to the Earth (roughly 200,000 kilometers) and took only 20 days to orbit the Earth. Also, one Earth 'day' was about 18 hours long (instead of our 24 hour day). The tides on Earth were also much stronger since the moon was closer to the Earth. The Pioneer 0 (also known as Thor-Able 1) probe was designed to go into orbit around the Moon and carried a TV camera and other instruments as part of the first International Geophysical Year  (IGY) science payload. It was the first attempt by the USA at a lunar mission. On August 17, 1958, the spacecraft was destroyed by an explosion of the first (Thor booster) stage 77 seconds after launch at 16 km altitude, 16 km downrange over the Atlantic. Failure was suspected to be due to a ruptured fuel or oxygen line. Erratic telemetry signals were received from the payload and upper stages for 123 seconds after the explosion, and the upper stages were tracked to impact in the ocean. TIROS I (or TIROS-1) was the first successful weather satellite, and the first of a series of Television Infrared Observation Satellites. It was launched at 6:40 AM EST  on April 1, 1960 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the United States. TIROS I was designed to test experimental techniques for taking television footage of weather patterns from an almost circular orbit, at an altitude ranging from 435.5 miles (700.9 km) to 468.28 miles (753.62 km). Though operational for only 78 days (15 days fewer than planned), it was vastly more successful than Vanguard 2 in demonstrating that satellites were useful for surveying atmospheric conditions from space and in sending back 22,952 images. TIROS I was 19 inches (0.48 m) tall and 42 inches (1.1 m) in diameter. Two television cameras were housed in the 270 pounds (120 kg) craft, along with two magnetic tape recorders which could be used to store photographs when the satellite was out of communications range. Power was supplied by onboard batteries, charged by 9200 solar cells. In 1952, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) announced the International Geophysical Year (IGY), a time span between July 1957 to December 1958. This period was to be filled with numerous scientific experiments and studies about Earth. It was in 1955 that the Soviet Union surprised the world by announcing the plan to orbit a satellite in the International Geophysical Year. As this was the time of great rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, US President Eisenhower promised that the United States would orbit a satellite in this period themselves. This was the start of the Space Race. Both countries had missiles in development, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). Their mission was the same on both sides: To deliver a single nuclear warhead over an intercontinental distance. But as the Soviet warhead was much heavier than the US one, the Soviets developed, from the beginning on, a stronger rocket, which showed very useful later in history for use as a space launcher. In the United States, the satellite should have been orbited by an all-civil rocket, the Vanguard. sputnik 1 was launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. It was a shock for the western hemisphere, all forth the United States. Not only that the Soviets had orbited a satellite, it was the mass that shocked the governmental authorities. Though the Sputnik itself weighed only 84 kilograms, the third stage of the rocket orbited the Earth as well. And this stage alone weighed about 7.5 tonnes. In contrast, the US satellite, named like its launcher Vanguard, had a mass of only 1.36 kilograms and the rocket was more like a patchwork. Tauntingly said, the Americans put every kind of rocket together they could find. Not that surprising that the maiden launched failed only a few seconds after lift-off. But in the progress of developing the first satellites, the United States slowly recognized their shortfall in rocket technology and allowed Wernher von Braun and his Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) to reinforce a military Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM), the Redstone, with two additional stages, so that this launcher, now called Jupiter-C, was able to deliver a small payload into orbit. The first US satellite, Explorer 1, was successfully put into orbit on January 31, 1958. In the meantime, the Soviets had launched a dog onboard Sputnik 2, a satellite with a mass of 508 kilograms. But already in this very early phase, one difference showed up. While the Soviets were able to put large payloads into orbit, their scientific payloads often suffered under the backlog in electronics and the kind of the academic landscape. Explorer 1, for example, although weighing only a bit more than a kilogram, gave valuable information about a radiation belt around the Earth, later called the Van-Allen Belt after the professor who developed the instrument onboard the satellite. In contrast the Soviets had problems to exchange data and information as the whole space program was highly classified.t soon became clear for both sides, that space flight was a perfect environment to show their assumed technological supremacy over each other. Both thought that they could document the superiority of their respective administrations. That's why both of them early envisaged a manned space flight. The Soviets approached their goal with a relatively simple solution. A sphere-shaped capsule with no possibility for the spaceman to control or steer the craft. On the other side of the Earth, the Americans had two concepts under investigation. They had a very successful experimental flight program, the X-15. One option was to develop a next evolutionary step of this craft, the reusable like a plane X-20. First to be carried under a Mach-3 bomber, the B-70, up the atmosphere to fly ballistic flight profiles. Later the craft should have been fitted onto a Titan rocket in order to fly orbital missions. As the realisation of this program would have taken a long time, it was decided to initiate the "Man in Space Soonest" program, that later became the Mercury project. The X-20 was kept alive for a few years as an Air Force program but was then cancelled. One can only speculate how space flight would have developed if the United States had chosen a fully reusable craft from the beginning on. After these initial competitions between the two Superpowers about the firsts, like first satellite, first man in space, first "space walk", both states soon targeted a new major goal: the moon. Although the Soviets denied until its decline in 1991 all the time that they had a moon program, the whole program is clear today. Both countries depended with their ambitious programs on large boosters: the Saturn V on the US side and the N-1 on the Soviet side. Today one can say, that the N-1 was the only major failure of the Soviet or today Russian space program (beside the point, that not a single Mars probe ever functioned as intended, if ever reaching Mars). But it was a very serious duel. Both rivals took great risks in achieving their goals. And as no one has luck for all times, both had to mourn about first victims. Vladimir Komarov died on the first manned flight of a new capsule, the Soyuz 1. The United States lamented about the crew of Apollo 1, Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Virgil "Gus" Grissom. But nonetheless the United States landed on the moon in 1969 and after a third failure in trying to launch their super-rocket N-1 the Soviets cancelled their moon program. But this was not the end of the Space Race. It seemed that the United States had won, but the Soviets had an ace in the hole. They switched from the exploration of the moon to a completely different goal: manned space stations. Salyut 1 was launched on April 19, 1971. The first crew that docked with the station, Soyuz 11, directly achieved a new endurance record of 23 days, the obviously new goal of the Space Race. Sadly, the crew of Soyuz 11 died at re-entry due to an open valve. As the United States launched their first space station, Skylab, in 1973, the Soviet Union already had Salyut 2 in orbit and gained a lot of experience in long time stays in microgravity and about operating space stations. But Salyut 2 was still a small station compared to Skylab and had much in common with the first one of its name. So it was not very surprising that the first crew of Skylab set a new endurance record in 1973. After the United States stopped their Apollo-based flights with the Apollo-Soyuz-Test-Project (ASTP) in 1975 to wait for their new Space Transportation System or Space Shuttle, the Soviet Union continued their space station program with a steady pace. In regular intervals, new stations were orbited and each of them incorporated improvements and new features. With Salyut 6, launched in 1977, the Soviets entered a new phase. This was the first station that had two docking ports, so it could be replenished by unmanned cargo transports as well as receiving guests on an additional Soyuz ferry. The Space Race practically ended with the mothballing of Skylab but still both states walked somewhat side by side: both opened their spacecrafts to international guests. The Soviet Union started their Intercosmos program in 1978 with the first flight of a Czech cosmonaut, Vladimir Remek, the Space Shuttle saw the first non-American to fly in 1983, German Ulf Merbold. Although during the first half of the 1980s the rivalry between both countries grew over again, the signs of a new Space Race were only a short flame up: Neither the United States with their space station Freedom, nor the Soviet Union with their Shuttle-craft Buran had the will or money to push these programs through. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new era was to become reality. US-built rockets like the Atlas flew with Russian-built engines. The Space Shuttle docked with the Mir space station and Americans stayed for 6 months onboard the station while Russian cosmonauts flew on the Shuttle. And today we have the International Space Station ISS. But this was only the end of the first part: A new Space Race already waited on the horizon. To be more precise, not only one, but instead three Space Races would soon become reality. Watch out for the next parts of the Space Race. Klaus Schmidt Click to enlarge Vostok 6, the final Vostok flight, was the first human spaceflight mission to carry a woman - cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova - into space. Her photographs of the horizon from space were later used to identify aerosol layers within the atmosphere. The mission, a joint flight with Vostok 5, was originally conceived as being a joint mission with two Vostoks each carrying a female cosmonaut, but this changed as the Vostok programme experienced cutbacks as a precursor to the retooling of the programme into the Voskhod programme. The landing site was the Pavinskiy Collective Farm west of Bayevo in the Altai Region. After parachuting from the capsule, Tereshkova barely missed the lake because of strong winds. Apollo 8 was the first human spaceflight mission to escape from the gravitational field of planet Earth; the first to be captured by and escape from the gravitational field of another celestial body; and the first crewed voyage to return to planet Earth from another celestial body - Earth's Moon. The three-man crew of Mission Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders became the first humans to see the far side of the Moon with their own eyes, as well as the first humans to see planet Earth from beyond low Earth orbit. The mission was accomplished with the first manned launch of a Saturn V rocket. Apollo 8 was the second manned mission of the Apollo Program. Originally planned as a low Earth orbit Lunar Module/Command Module test, the mission profile was changed to the more ambitious lunar orbital flight in August 1968 when the Lunar Module scheduled for the flight became delayed. The new mission's profile, procedures and personnel requirements left an uncharacteristically short time frame for training and preparation, thus placing more demands than usual on the time, talent, and discipline of the crew. After launching on December 21, 1968, the crew took three days to travel to the Moon. They orbited ten times over the course of 20 hours, during which the crew made a Christmas Eve television broadcast in which they read the first 10 verses from the Book of Genesis. At the time, the broadcast was the most watched TV program ever. Apollo 8's successful mission paved the way for Apollo 11 to fulfill U.S. President John F. Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. Soyuz 11 was launched on June 6, 1971 with Georgi Dobrovolsky (commander), Vladislav Volkov (flight engineer), and Viktor Patsayev (research engineer).  They became the first crew to live and work on a space station, Salyut 1.  After their experiments were completed they left the station in their Soyuz spacecraft for their return to earth.  A valve opened, caused by the vibrations of the separation the descent module from the orbital module (the two pressurized modules of a Soyuz spacecraft) before re-entry.  This valve is designed to open after landing to equalize pressure inside the cabin with the outside.  It is believed that the crew died within 45 seconds.   Patsayev was found with a bruised hand which may have been caused from his attempt to manually close the valve, which is a lengthy procedure.  Ground controllers were unaware of any trouble until they opened the hatch of Soyuz 11, only to find the three cosmonauts had died. Soyuz 11 was launched on June 6, 1971 with Georgi Dobrovolsky (commander), Vladislav Volkov (flight engineer), and Viktor Patsayev (research engineer).  They became the first crew to live and work on a space station, Salyut 1.  After their experiments were completed they left the station in their Soyuz spacecraft for their return to earth.  A valve opened, caused by the vibrations of the separation the descent module from the orbital module (the two pressurized modules of a Soyuz spacecraft) before re-entry.  This valve is designed to open after landing to equalize pressure inside the cabin with the outside.  It is believed that the crew died within 45 seconds.   Patsayev was found with a bruised hand which may have been caused from his attempt to manually close the valve, which is a lengthy procedure.  Ground controllers were unaware of any trouble until they opened the hatch of Soyuz 11, only to find the three cosmonauts had died. The pinnacle of Soviet space exploration was the Mir space station, the core module being launched in 1986, and in that same year took part in the first transfer of a cosmonaut from one space station (Mir) to another (still orbiting and active Salyut 7). The station had originally been designed to be a modular station that could have up to five add-on modules installed, and achieved its maximum size in 1996 with the final module installed that year. Since then the station had innumerable problems with reliability and equipment failures, although much experience was gained by the next generation of American astronauts when it came to dealing with space station emergencies (i.e., fires, blackouts, computer failures). In conclusion, the space race essentially died out with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and was made official when in March 2001 the Mir space station crashed into the Pacific Ocean. And so the United States, along with whatever cooperating countries with sufficient industrial bases or with space programs of their own, will be a major component in constructing the International space station. Although from the history of cuts to NASA’s budget, the future is looking rather blurry and dim for such a station. Hopefully, exploration of the planets of the solar system will continue into the next century, and the human race can forego nuking itself into oblivion before we can colonize other planets. For now, though, a space station with better longevity than any of the previous ones (Salyut, Skylab, Mir) will be an achievement, maybe even a temporary moon base. On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed upon reentry into the earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven crew members. Shortly after the incident, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) was set up to investigate the causes of the disaster. The board summarized its findings in a report released on August 26. This series of three articles analyzes the report and the accident itself. Part 1 discussed the physical cause of the accident—a breach in the orbiter’s Thermal Protection System caused by a foam strike during the shuttle’s launch. The second part analyzes schedule pressures and the reaction of shuttle engineers and management after the launch. The third and final part looks at the underlying cause of the accident: the subordination of the scientific purposes of the shuttle to a political and economic system dominated by the demands of private profit. Contributing to the events that led to the Columbia accident was the extraordinary pressure that NASA was placed under to meet a strict launch schedule. As mentioned in the first article of this series, this pressure led NASA management to downgrade the significance of previous foam strikes on the orbiter. It also affected the way NASA management reacted to the discovery of the strike on Columbia—their main concern was not for the safety of the crew but the impact the incident would have on future launches. The pressure came directly from the Bush administration, channeled through the Bush-appointed NASA administrator, Sean O’Keefe. The administration presented NASA with an ultimatum: either it had to prove that it could complete the first phase of the International Space Station (ISS) by February 19, 2004—and do this without significant cost overruns—or it risked a sharp cut in budget financing or perhaps an elimination of the manned space program as a whole. The number of launches that NASA needed to complete by February to meet its goal meant that any unforeseen incidents on any of the orbiters would throw the whole schedule off. NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe US Apache Helicopter crews were on a training mission with foreign pilots on the morning of February 1, 2003. Gun-camera footage picks up the shuttle as it enters the atmosphere over Central Texas. The footage was released a couple of days after the crash. Video is courtesy of Fort Hood and DOD. Space Shuttle Columbia was launched on January 16th, 2003 at 9.39am CST. Columbia (Flight STS-107) was on a 16-day science research mission in Earth orbit which performed experiments in space. It was the 113th mission. Columbia was the oldest space shuttle in the fleet of four. It was the first space shuttle to be launched in Earth orbit in 1981. The crew of Space Shuttle Columbia consisted of 7 astronauts:  - Rick D. Husband - Commander  - William C. McCool - Pilot  - Michael P. Anderson  - David M. Brown  - Kalpana Chawla  - Laurel Clark  - Ilan Ramon - first Israeli in space 7-8 minutes before the failure, gauges started to loose readings in Columbia's left wing, left landing gear brake system and tyre. 7.59am (CST) temperature and pressure gauges went off scale. 8am - All vehicle data was lost at 207,135 ft above the Earth at Mach 18.3 (about 12,500 mph) when the Columbia Space Shuttle broke up over north-central Texas. It was about 16 minutes prior to its scheduled landing at Florida's Kennedy Space Center. The last communication from Houston ground control to Columbia commander Rick Husband was: "To Columbia, here is Houston; we see your tyre pressure messages and we did not copy your last message." After a moment, Husband replied: "Roger but ..." After a brief crackling noise, contact was lost. The Space Shuttle Columbia was scheduled to land 8.16am (2.16GMT). Several white trails of smoke were seen coming from shuttle as it split up. Residents in North Texas heard a loud boom. Video of Columbia's descent over Texas showed the shuttle breaking up upon re-entry. Initial reports were of small bits of debris spread in a wide area in Texas. Nasa advised people not to touch shuttle debris as the shuttle engines use highly toxic chemicals. In an address to the nation on Saturday 1st at 4.45 EST, President George W. Bush confirmed the space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven were lost after the Orbiter broke up during re-entry on its landing approach to the Kennedy Space Center.

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