EMERGING TeCh Chapter 1 The Final Frontier I magine you are living hundreds of years ago You gaze into the stars that light up the night sky You ponder the mysteries of the great unknown You think about soaring into space and making amazing discoveries You are not alone Throughout history people have dreamed about space travel Fictional space Long before space travel was possible people dreamed of exploring distant planets 44
The Soviet Sputnik 1 made history as the world’s first human-made satellite travelers entertained children and adults before real astronauts ever stepped aboard rocket ships Science fiction author Jules Verne wrote in 1865 about blasting passengers to the moon from a cannon A century later spacemen Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon captured the imaginations of kids in comic strips and on television By that time dreams of space were starting to come true Scientists began designing rocket engines in the early 1900s Germany used long-range rockets to batter England in an attempt to escape defeat in 5
EMERGING TeCh Planting the Seeds for Space Travel The first scientists to ponder the secrets of the universe were ancient astronomers They noted points of light that seemed to move among the stars They called the objects planets and named them after Roman gods Included were Jupiter king of gods Mars god of war and Venus goddess of love The astronomers were also fascinated by comets and meteors flying through the sky The invention of the telescope in 1608 allowed astronomers to explore the heavens and make new discoveries For example in the 1600s astronomers discovered that the planets orbited the sun World War II The weapons zoomed through the air at 3,500 miles per hour 5,633 kilometers per hour The end of the war launched a mad space race between the United States and the Soviet Union The battle emerged as part of the Cold War a competition between two world superpowers Americans were shocked when a Soviet craft called Sputnik 1 became the first satellite to orbit Earth in 1957 They were stunned again when Russian cosmo naut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth in 1961 The Soviets were winning the space race U S president John F Kennedy wanted to do something about it He unveiled his plan in a historic speech to Congress in 1961 I believe that this nation should 6
John Glenn poses next to his spacecraft just before taking off to become the first American in orbit in 1962 commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth he said No single space proj ect in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space President Kennedy’s words motivated the scien tists and engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA But they also inspired the Soviets to try to reach the moon first American astronaut John Glenn orbited Earth in 1962 Russian 7 Personal sPace Travel
