Humans in Space, Part I

After a decades-long hiatus, humans are once again focused on returning to the Moon, and we are seriously considering voyages to worlds beyond it for the first time. This is the first of a two-part series on how we got into space decades ago and our more recent efforts to push beyond the confines of the Earth.

Dreams of going into space date back thousands of years, at least to the Greek’s mythological tale of Icarus. It was not until Isaac Newton’s publications on space mechanics that we started to comprehend what it might take to get into space. The imagination of Jules Verne in the late 1800s inspired Wernher von Braun’s rocket programs in the 1930s-1940s, which succeeded in first reaching space. His follow-up work for the United States in the 1950s-1960s, and that of those who emulated him in the Soviet Union, achieved the means to send animals and then humans into Earth’s orbit, and to finally landing humans on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

The initial ‘Space Race’ gave way to more domestic agendas for crewed missions. Hundreds of flights were dedicated to building and then supplying Earth-orbiting space stations, and astronauts from many countries got their first trip into space aboard either Soviet/Russian Soyuz or U.S. Space Transportation System (STS, aka Space Shuttle) flights.

The most fascinating part of these efforts to put humans in space is not the details of the missions themselves, but the very real human side associated with these efforts that were often not revealed until years later. Come join us at The Science Circle to learn about why and how we decided to go into space and what happened when we did.

By Phil Youngblood