US Space Program Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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After the lau nch of the Russian satellite Sputnik on October 4, 1957, the U.S. Congress met this Cold War challenge by greatly enhancing the space program of the United States. On July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act (Public Law 85-568) creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Organized as a civilian agency, it was given a mission of peaceful space research.

NASA has directed two kinds of space programs-unmanned flights to the solar system, and manned flights. Unmanned flights have included the Ranger space probes to photograph the Moon, the Surveyor probes that made the first American landings on the Moon, the Viking probes to Mars to study its soil, and the Pioneer probes to study Venus.

Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 mapped Jupiter and Saturn, flew by Uranus in 1986 and past Neptune in 1989, and photographed active volcanoes on Io (a moon of Jupiter) and geysers on Triton (a moon of Neptune). The Magellan probe mapped the surface of Venus in 1990. The Pathfinder probe landed on Mars and sent out a land rover vehicle, Sojourner, to explore Martian surface chemistry. In January 2004, the Spirit rover landed at the Gusev Crater on the surface of Mars. In December 2004 the Cassini-Huygens mission visited Saturn’s moon Titan to study its atmosphere and geology.

NASA’s program of manned flights into space began in 1958. The Kennedy Space Flight Center was assigned responsibility for launching manned space flights; the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston was put in charge of managing space flights from lift-off to landing. America’s space travel began with the Mercury program when Ham, a chimpanzee, accomplished an 18-minute flight in a Mercury capsule. On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan B. Shepherd made a 15-minute sub-orbital flight in a Mercury capsule dubbed Freedom 7. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy, in an address to Congress, called for a national goal-the landing of a man on the Moon “by the end of the decade” (the 1960s). To meet the goal a crash program was instituted.

Human exploration of space began to develop rapidly in the 1960s. On February 20, 1962, John H. Glenn, Jr., became the first American to orbit the Earth. Others followed him in the Mercury missions. On March 23, 1965, NASA sent astronauts Gus Grissom and John W. Young into space in Gemini 3, a larger capsule than the Mercury. In August 1965 the Gemini 5 mission was able to last eight days using fuel cells to generate electricity.

On December 21, 1968, NASA launched Apollo 8 on a mission to orbit the Moon. On Christmas Eve, they sent back television pictures of the Earth from lunar orbit. Apollo 8 returned safely to earth on December 27, 1968. Perhaps the greatest triumph came on July 20, 1969, when from the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility the words, “Houston, the Eagle has landed,” ended several seconds of deathly silence in which it was not known if the Eagle, from the Apollo 11 had survived its landing. The landing was followed by a moonwalk by astronauts as the world watched on television. After conducting a number of scientific experiments, the Eagle lifted off to rejoin Apollo 11. More manned flights to the Moon followed.

On May 14, 1973, NASA launched Skylab, a manned space laboratory, into earth’s orbit. On April 12, 1981, NASA launched Columbia, the first of its fleet of reusable manned space shuttles that, after earth orbit, landed in California as if it were an ordinary airplane. In the more peaceful postCold War era, America’s space program expanded to include well over a dozen countries. NASA today promotes interest in space exploration with tours of launch sites, interviews with astronauts, space camps, and other educational programs. NASA has experienced a number of dramatic launch and recovery failures that, under its publicly open policy, have been dramatically captured on television. Rockets have exploded on launch pads. Astronauts have been killed in tests and in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters. Tragedy almost struck with the voyage of Apollo 13 to the Moon.

NASA has contributed to the advancement of knowledge of space and to the improvement of human life on earth. Great accomplishments in the fields of biology, medicine, engineering, management, robotics, foods, and materials have brought a vast number of products to the world. These include everything from Teflon, to Tang, to orange juice, to communications satellites, to ear thermometers, to space suit technology used in numerous medical situations. NASA has conducted many biological experiments.

From these have come microspheres that are used to clean oil spills and treat tumors. Great advances in plastics, foods, and firefighting equipment have come out of NASA’s work. On January 15, 2004, President George W. Bush called for renewal of the goal of manned missions to the planets.

Bibliography:

David Aaron Baker, Inventions from Outer Space: Everyday Uses for NASA Technology (Random House, 2000);
Andrew Chaikin, Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts (Penguin, 1998);
Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (Simon & Schuster, 2000);
Roger D. Launius, NASA: A History of the S. Civil Space Program (Krieger Publishing Company, 2000);
Frank Sietzen and Keith Cowing, New Moon Rising: The Making of America’s New Space Vision and the Remaking of NASA (Apogee Books, 2004);
Steven Strick, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology (Rutgers University Press, 2004);
Peter Douglas Ward, Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of} Alien Life (Penguin Group, 2005).