When I was very young I recollect being encouraged to stay up very late one night with my father and watch on an little black and white television as Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong made history by setting foot on its surface. The build-up prior to the moon landing and the frequent news reports about the so-called ‘Space Race’ between the Americans and the Russians made a very big impression on me as a young child and even now I am still interested in space and space travel. I make no claim to be highly intellectual about it all, but the thought of a universe so huge that we can’t even begin to conceive its size is very humbling. We humans really are incredibly insignificant beings when measured against everything else that exists.
Humans have been mesmerised by the skies since before recorded history. Most ancient civilisations came up with rites and traditions based on the movements of the stars and planets, and even in this day and age our actions are affected by the sun and the moon far more than we ever understand. Over thousands and thousands of years, humans must have looked to the skies and wondered what the other planets were like. In fact, there is an entire industry that has grown up around the idea of life on other planets – aliens, little green men, unidentified flying objects, the complete science fiction genre of movies and literature, imaginary weapons with light pouring from a Laser eye – would any of these ideas exist if there were no distant planets visible for them to allegedly originate from?
With huge advances in technology over the last hundred years, the wish to venture into space and see other planets slowly progressed from a dream to a possible reality and the Cold War technology battle between the USA and the USSR led to the relatively fast production of machines which could travel further than the earth’s atmosphere. The V2 rocket, created by the Germans had become the first man-made machine which could be launched into space without any problems, and soon after the end of the Second World War, when both the United States and the Soviets had gained knowledge of the technology, their first development work had the intention of using the knowledge for weaponry. But as soon as the Russians managed to launch a human into space in 1961, the Americans immediately decided to move ahead with their own schedule for manned space exploration.
The very first American to go into space did so merely one month behind Yuri Gagarin and from that day onwards, both countries began to focus on the moon as their destination for exploration. During the 1960’s automated crafts were sent to the moon and sent back data about its surface, and the Russians also successfully flew an unmanned craft into orbit around the moon, which provided the first ever images of the far side of the moon.
In a short number of years, the USA launched the very first manned spacecraft to actually reach the moon. Apollo 8, launched in 1968, orbited the moon and came back safely to earth. It’s amazing to think that it was only the following year when Apollo 11 achieved the feat of safely setting down on the moon meaning that two humans could actually walk on its surface. It’s an even more amazing feat when you find out that the complete journey to the moon and back again was achieved with less computer ability than my home PC, a games console, Laser eye surgery equipment or a lot of mobile phones!
Apollo 11 is one of the first actual news stories that I can recollect being aware of, largely I suppose because it received so much coverage, but I was completely fascinated by it all and have continued to have an interest in space related developments to this very day. But it’s a sad sign of the media’s manipulation of what is thought of as news, that just two missions later, Apollo 13 only became newsworthy when events took a turn for the worse.
Questions raised by the disaster (and final triumph) of Apollo 13, as well as the cost of the space programme led to a gradual reduction in manned space flights, and the last man to walk on the moon did so in 1972. Since then, of course, many unmanned craft have been sent into space by a number of space projects and the International Space Station is orbiting the earth right now, and is very visible if you are in the right place at the right time – a streak of light travelling across the sky as if launched from a Laser eye beam.
As science and technology advance (just contemplate how far we’ve come in the last century – from the Ford Model T to the Bugatti Veyron, bi-planes to supersonic jets, fountain pens to computers, monocles to Laser eye surgery – the list is endless), humans will carry on sending spacecrafts further and further into the depths of the universe and in the future will probably discover numerous things which are way beyond our imagination right now. But I know for sure that ever since that late night when I watched Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon, I will always be fascinated by the latest discoveries about the universe.
No comments:
Post a Comment