HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY 300 – UNIT 9



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|·  Astronaut - a person who travels beyond the earth's atmosphere |

|· Broadcast - Signals sent by radio or television to many stations. |

|· Command ship – Part of the spacecraft where orders are given. |

|·  Cosmonaut - a Russian traveler beyond the earth's atmosphere |

|· Craters - Bowl-shaped dips. |

|· Event - Something important that happens. |

|· Failed - Did not work right. |

|· Force - Strength; power. |

|· Flight - A ride in an airplane or rocket. |

|· Gravity - The pull that one object has upon another object. |

|·  Infinite - having no limits or boundaries |

|· Orbit - The path that one thing takes around another. |

|· Space age - The time of rockets and space travel. |

|· Technical institute - School that teaches a special trade or type of knowledge. |

A SPACE COMMUNITY

If you could take a space trip, where would you go? What would you see? What kind of a spaceship would you need?

Long ago, people thought many strange things about space. They wanted to understand space but had no way of studying the moon and stars. People were often afraid of things they did not understand. Some believed the moon was made of green cheese and the dark space was filled with monsters. Others thought that the stars were holes punched in the night sky, letting in light from heaven.

Years later when the scientists first began to study space, they dreamed of the time when man could travel into space. They were hoping that many questions about space would be answered.

A young boy about your age, who had been born in England, wondered about many things. He wanted to know why things work. He wondered what held the stars in place. He noticed that each planet traveled in its own path. The older Isaac Newton grew, the more he wondered about the world around him. He went to college to study.

Many people laughed at the ideas that Isaac Newton wrote about. He understood something about the universe by watching the way the planets and stars moved across the sky. He made himself sick one time when he was trying to figure out the orbit of a comet in the sky. He thought so much about it that he forgot to eat or sleep for five days.

Then one day, the college he was going to was closed. All of the students were sent home because of terrible sickness in the city. His mother would not let him do the chores around the house, so he spent a lot of time in the apple orchard near his home. While he was sitting under one of the trees one day, an apple fell. He picked it up and at the same time saw that the moon had come up. All of a sudden, he knew that the same force that drew the apple toward the ground held the moon in its orbit in the sky. Gravity is the force that pulls things toward the center of the earth.

Sir Isaac Newton was a very smart man because he asked questions, thought hard, and studied a lot. A long time ago, he gave us many of the answers we need today. His studies about gravity caused others to figure out how to make rockets powerful enough to fly above the earth's gravity.

Dr. Robert Goddard

The first scientist in the United States to become interested in rockets was a young man named Robert Goddard. Just like Newton, Goddard wondered what it would be like to travel through space. He wanted to know what was out there. When he was about your age, he spent a lot of time thinking about how rockets worked. He wondered what kinds of things rockets might do for us. He studied hard and learned his math lessons. Math is important to figuring the angles, speed, and distances to overcome gravity. He was very excited about the idea of space travel. Could man really land on the moon someday?

Well, you know that a scientist experiments with his ideas. That is just what Robert Goddard did. His first working rocket was as tall as two men. It went up 41 feet when it was launched. Wow! The only problem was that it turned upside down and landed in a neighbor's cabbage patch not too far away.

He went to a special school called a technical institute to learn more about science. Then he went to a university. He studied more about the things that Sir Isaac Newton had discovered. Sir Isaac's discoveries helped Dr. Goddard figure out how to build rockets. Dr. Goddard made special fuels and pumps to get the rockets off the ground.

At first, people laughed at him just like they laughed at Isaac Newton. They called him "the moon-rocket man." This did not stop him. He kept trying. He wanted to build a rocket that would soar through the sky.

Dr. Goddard made rockets that could fly a little higher each time he tried. He needed large open spaces to test his inventions, so he went to New Mexico. He had lots of room to launch the rockets there. Did you know that rockets are still tested in New Mexico?

People started taking notice of what he was doing and gave him money to help him with his experiments. Then, during World War II, he helped the government build airplanes with rocket engines. The engines gave the planes the ability to take off quickly.

Dr. Goddard was an important man in our country's history. He lived long enough to see people come to accept the idea that man would land on the moon.

You know, of course, that Dr. Goddard was right. Man did land on the moon. You are living in the space age. You may want to ask your grandparents or other older adults how they felt when that happened.

SPACE TRAVELERS

For a long time, people have wondered what it would be like to travel in space. Perhaps you have wondered that yourself. In this section, you will learn about some real men who became astronauts.

In 1961, a man from the United States was the first man to ride in a rocket. He was called an astronaut because he would travel in space. This astronaut's name was Alan Shepard. He went up into space in a one-man spacecraft. Its name was the Mercury. He had a short, fast ride. When he came down to earth again his space capsule landed in the ocean.

Another astronaut was John Glenn. He flew into space in the Friendship VII in 1962. His spacecraft made a trip all the way around the earth in a little more than one hour. He went much faster than a jet plane. Can you imagine that? When he came back to earth, he also landed in the ocean. What an exciting trip! Later, he served the U.S. government as a senator from the state of Ohio.

John Glenn returned to space in the fall of 1998 at the age of 77! On his second space flight, he took part in scientific research on how space travel affects the aging process.

The Kennedy Space Center in Florida became a famous place. Every time a rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, people around the world watched. The whole world knew about the flights of astronauts Shepard and Glenn. Since then, all of the United States astronauts have taken off from the Kennedy Space Center. Florida is now called "The Gateway to Space."

Space Exploration

Do you think we are alone in the universe? The universe is infinite. No one can say with absolute certainty that we are the only life forms living in it. The goal of many space exploration programs is to answer age-old questions about life, including how life began and if life exists elsewhere in the universe. When NASA launched Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 in 1977, the unmanned space probes were equipped with a message designed to communicate with any possible extraterrestrial civilizations. The more we learn about the universe, the more we can understand our place in it.

Rocket Technology

Have you ever launched a model rocket in your backyard? Model rockets use solid fuel made of special chemicals to propel it into the air. Ancient rockets, like those used by Chinese armies to defend against Mongol invaders, also used solid fuel. Throughout history, rockets have been used mainly as a weapon. During the early 1900s, the British army created a special military unit just for rockets. Although rocket technology improved over the years, solid fuel remained the main method of propulsion until 1920s, when Robert Goddard began experimenting with liquid fuel. On March 16, 1926, Goddard launched the first successful liquid-propelled rocket and changed the way rockets were built.

When World War II broke out in 1939, governments in the United States, Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Germany began developing liquid-propelled rockets for military purposes. Germany created the most successful of the military rockets, called the V-2. After the war ended, the United States army used captured V-2s for experimental research. Despite several successful launches into the upper atmosphere, the United States was not the first country to use a rocket to send a man-made object into space. The honor belongs to the former USSR, which launched the satellite Sputnik into space on October 4, 1957.

The Space Race

Have you ever tried to be the first person to achieve a goal? Maybe you tried to be the first person to hit 25 homeruns on your neighborhood baseball team. Maybe you practiced for hours to be the first person in your community selected for all-state chorus. After the successful launch of Sputnik, the USSR sent another satellite into space. Unlike Sputnik, the second satellite, called Sputnik 2, carried a passenger. In 1957, a dog named Laika became the first animal to orbit the Earth. Determined to beat the USSR in space exploration, the United States government established the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA). NASA's job was to plan, direct, and conduct all aeronautical and space activities. The space race had begun.

In 1961, the USSR pulled ahead in the space race by sending the first man into space. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin spent one hour and 48 minutes in space aboard Vostok 1 before landing safely in Siberia. A few months later, the United States evened the score by sending Naval Commander Alan Shepard, Jr., the first American astronaut, into space. Less than a year later, American astronaut John Glenn, Jr. made history by becoming the first person to orbit the Earth in the spacecraft Friendship 7.

As technology improved, time spent in space and mission complexity increased. In 1965, Russian cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left his spacecraft and drifted into space on a tether, making history as the first person to walk in space. During that same year, astronaut Major Edward White II became the first American to leave a spacecraft in space. Using a cutting-edge jet-maneuvering device, he spent 21 minutes moving himself around in space. Today, astronauts routinely complete space walks to make spacecraft repairs, conduct research, and gather data.

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Astronauts in space

Image courtesy of NASA

Over time, the main goal of the space race became sending a human to the moon. The first successful landing on the moon was completed by the Russian spacecraft Luna 9 on in 1966. The United States completed its first successful landing only a few months later with Surveyor 1. History was finally made with the success of the Apollo 11 mission. On July 20, 1969, the Eagle lunar module carrying Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. landed on the moon. At 10:56 p.m., Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the surface of another celestial object. He captured the moment in the now famous quote, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Space Stations

What do you think it would be like to live in space? Imagine eating your breakfast while looking at Earth or Mars out the window. It may sound like science fiction, but humans have been living in space for years. In 1971 the Soviet Union launched Salyut 1, the world's first space station. Two years later, the United States launched first American space station, called Skylab. Although it was damaged during its launch, Skylab was repaired by the astronaut crew in space. While in space, the Skylab crew conducted solar observations and medical experiments on the effects of long-duration space flights. After the research was complete, Skylab was abandoned. It remained in orbit for several years before re-entering Earth's atmosphere and breaking apart over Australia.

Perhaps the most successful space station was the Russian space station Mir. Launched in 1986, Mir was originally estimated to last only five years in space, but ended up lasting fifteen years. The space station weighed over 100 tons and was as large as six school buses. Despite its size, Mir was designed to house only three crew members, but has hosted as many as six at a time. Many international scientists and American astronauts visited Mir to conduct experiments and gather research data. Mi ended its flight in 2001, falling to Earth near Nadi, Fiji in the South Pacific.

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Mir Space Station

Image courtesy of NASA

Have you ever noticed that you can accomplish a lot more when you work with someone else? In 1996, NASA, the Russian, European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies joined forces to build an International Space Station. Unfortunately, the project has been plagued by problems, including the tragic Columbia disaster in 2003.

Let's Review

|Date |Accomplishment |

|1926 |Robert Goddard launches first successful liquid-propelled rocket. |

|1957 |Russian satellite Sputnik becomes first man-made object sent into space. |

| |Russian spacecraft Sputnik 2 sends first animal into space. |

|1961 |Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes first person sent into space aboard Vostok 1. |

| |Astronaut Alan Shepard becomes first American sent into space aboard Freedom 7. |

|1962 |Astronaut John Glenn, Jr. becomes first person to orbit the Earth aboard Friendship 7. |

|1965 |Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov completes first space walk. |

| |Astronaut Edward White II becomes first American to complete a space walk. |

|1966 |Russian spacecraft Luna 9 completes first successful landing on the moon. |

| |American spacecraft Surveyor 1 completes first successful landing on the moon. |

|1969 |Astronaut Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. |

|1971 |USSR launches first space station, Salyut 1. |

|1973 |United States launches first American space station, Skylab. |

|1986 |First module of Russian space station Mir launched. |

|1996 |NASA and the Russian, European, Japanese, and Canadian space agencies cooperate to build the first International Space Station. |

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Sputnik

Image courtesy of NASA

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