A Brief History of Space Travel From Sputnik 1 to Apollo 11

"A Brief History of Space Travel From Sputnik 1 to Apollo 11","

President Kennedy on September 12 1962 gave a speech in which he promised that we would build a rocket the size of a football field with various metal alloys many of which didn't even exist yet.


Something like this sounded way to premature.
 But we were motivated both by our own need to explore the moon as well as the more realistic fact that the Russians had much more experience and were advancing alarmingly fast.


But the actual starting gun happened in 1957 when the Russians released Sputnik then just 1 month later the put a dog in orbit as well.
 Then the most damaging blow to American pride was in 1961 when the Russians had put a man in low orbit and he had done one circle around the earth in less than 2 hours.
 However were finally able to get into second place when we released a man called Alan Shepard into a brief sub orbit flight.
 7 military test pilots were selected to become part of this project and in extension the newly formed NASA.
 Then after this came project Gemini the biggest difference between project mercury and project Gemini was in the fact that project Gemini did two manned space travels and there for were named after the latin word for twins.


Gemini 4 had the first American EVA which was called extra vehicular activity or space walk (having a person outside of the spacecraft).
 We continued to gather more and more momentum.
 The most well-known happening during Gemini 8 in which came the first docking between two space vehicles.
 They were spinning so fast that crew nearly blacked out separating made the spinning even worse.


America began looking for better rockets that could get us into space then the titan rockets.
 It was most powerful engine ever created by mankind.
 It would transport man faster than he had ever traveled before and was also 100 times more powerful than the Redstone rocket which had launched Alan Shepard.


We at long last began scheduling for the trip to the moon.
 The man who was looking for the crew members was the only man out of the original 7 test pilots to never go into space (remember there was 7 members but only 6 flights).
 All 3 astronaut died one of which Virgil gust griffin who was the 2 American in space.
 It was found out that we had not properly made the electrical system which in the oxygen rich environment of the command capsule was horrible.


The Apollo project began taking it a bit slower taking several unmanned tests as well as completely redesigning the command capsule.
 There was a lot of pressure on them after Apollo 1.
 Then came Apollo 8-9-10 which all forged the way for the famous Apollo 11.
 This part of the mission was hardest part because every other aspect of the mission had already been tested repeatedly by the Apollo forebears and there were problems.
 However command accurately judged that this would not affect the landing and ordered them to proceed.
 Then only 300 feet above Neil took manual control and with only around 30 seconds of fuel left was able to expertly take the module down to the sea of tranquility.


"One small step for man, One giant step for mankind".