Space 60 Years of Space Conquest

Heralded by ancestors and precursors, the space age became a reality on October 4th, 1957 when a Russian Sputnik was the first manmade object to reach orbit. This was the start of a flurry of space missions, both in Earth orbit and at destination of the deep space. Space is now coming out of age and tends to be integrated into numerous fields of activity

Origins and Beginnings Moving To the Space Age Space Premieres

The 1960's Space Used

. afficionados of the space conquest, will find additional pictures concerning that on that page!

Origins and Beginnings

The ancestors of rocketry are to be found in Chinese rockets propelled by black powder. Such rockets appeared about A.D. 1200 and were used at war. They made their way into India, then the Middle East, and eventually Europe where they were used by the late 1200's. Rockets were further improved by the use of gunpowder instead of black powder and they continued to be used as weapons. These war rockets had a relatively short range, could not carry heavy payloads and were unguided after launch. Even Renaissance scientist Kepler wrote a story about traveling to the planets, and that one day there will be people who will be able to navigate and fly space vehicles from one planet to another. It was not until the 1900's however that Tsiolkovsky, a Russian schoolteacher, theorized space flight through the mean of improved rocketry. It was him who first proposed the used of liquid propellants (liquid oxygen and hydrogen) and the control of the flight through rudders in the exhaust or tilting the exhaust nozzle. Through other meaningful foresights, Tsiolkovsky may be considered the "Father of Space Travel". He never conducted any practical experiment however. He's famous too for that sentence which says: 'Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.' The idea of reconnaissance satellites or the use of spacecraft for astronomical observations also came early. U.S. Robert Goddard then was the first to realize the potentialities of missiles and space flight and to contribute directly in bringing them to practical realization. Goddard's career began in 1907 when his powder rocket experiments like a student attracted the attention of chool officials at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute of Clark University. As soon as by 1914, had he received two U.S. patents, one for a rocket using liquid fuel, the other for a two or three stage rocket using solid fuel. Robert Goddard's firsts to missilery and space also include the followings. Exploration of the practicality of using rocket propulsion to reach high altitudes and even the Moon as soon as by 1912, evidence that a rocket can work in a vacuum, first transport of science payload in a rocket flight in 1929, vanes used in the rocket motor blast for guidance in 1932, pumps suitable for rocket fuels, a rocket motor pivoted on gimbals under the influence of a gyro mechanism by 1937, or gyrocontrol systems. All such technical details were later found back in the German V-2 missiles. Goddard's work by the 1920s for the Smithsonian and the U.S. Navy were meant to raise weather instruments higher than with sounding balloons, bringing him to develop the mathematical theories of rocket propulsion as he outlined too the possibility of a rocket reaching the Moon and exploding a load of flash powder there to mark its arrival. That later point only resulted in ridicule through the publicity made to it in the press. Goddard, above all, launched the first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16th, 1926, at Auburn, MA. Keeping with some fundings from the Smithsonian in the 1920s and 1930s, and with the support too from Charles A. Lindbergh, who gained him some finances from the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, resulted into 'Liquid Propellant Rocket Development' by 1936. Anecdotically, he demonstrated too the basic idea of the bazooka by 1918 as, during World War II, the U.S. Navy assigned him, like often with rocketry specialists, to the development of practical jet assisted takeoff. Also he worked upon liquid propellant rocket motors capable of variable thrust. His work however went largely unrecognized in the USA until the dawn of the space age as he had died in 1945. Goddard's patents are still in use on today's rockets. Goddard tested things that later the Germans in World War II attributed to their success in guided missiles with the V-2. It thus was the Germans who made the real significant steps in the domain of modern rocketry. Hermann Oberth's, or Walter Hohmann's vulgarization and theoretical works led the German Army to engage into a rocketry program as soon as 1932. The liquid-fueled A2 rocket reached 1.5 miles in 1934. Wernher von Braun was responsible for this program. Von Braun and his team moved to the Baltic coast in 1937, on the island of Peenemünde (the inhabitants of which were moved and resettled on mainland), where they developed the ancestor to all modern rocketry, the A4. The A4 flew a controlled flight in October 1942. It was further turned into the V2 ("Vergeltunswaffe 2", that is "Retaliation Weapon 2"). It had a range of 200 miles (320 km), carrying a 1-ton warhead. The V2s were used against London and other Allied targets. Most of the engineers and of the material passed to the Allied in 1945, as Russians were left with minor takes, including several dozen physicists and mathematicians. The Nazis too were beginning to master near-orbital flight as they had deviced the reusable 'Amerika Bomber', or 'Silbervogel,' a sled (15 V2 engines)-launched, round-trip, orbital-gliding vehicle which would have droped a a dirty bomb, spreading radioactive sand or other elements across New York City. The craft had been deviced by Sanger with a participation of von Braun The craft was to perform a low-Earth orbit at approximately 115 to 120 miles (185-195 km) of altitude, a speed in excess of 3,800 mph (6,114 km/h) as it would have proceded by leaps and bounds from the stratosphere and surorbital space and again and able back to Germany. Oberth, on a other hand, had deviced a deadly weapon consisting of a orbiting mirror 3 mile (5 km)-wide to concentrate the solar light into a powerful beam. Such that mirror needed to be built in space like a kind of orbital station which had Germans to close to spaceflight. All such weapons were part of those secret weapons Hitler was boasting about, which were to change the course of war but Germans did not time enough to turn them into effective armement

Moving To the Space Age

Although the US Army had a rocketry program since May 1943 and that the teams settled in 1944 at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, the post-WWII funding did not favoured the sector. Research continued however with the launch of 64 V2s from White Sands and with more funding of rocketry at the different services of the US military. In 1948, the Secretary of Defense specified that it was up to the Army to develop tactical and Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM) and up to the Air Force to develop Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM). The Navy, as far as it was concerned, was about ballistic marines launched from ships or submarines (SLBM in the latter case). It was the Air Force which was seen then like the service which had the most competence about satellites and rocketry, which turned official and definitive later, under President Eisenhower, by the beginnings of the space age. In 1950 the Army had begun development of the Redstone rocket as the Air Force was developing the "Atlas" and the Navy the "Vanguard". The Army had moved again by mid-1949, this time to the west Florida coast, at this place which developed into Cape Canaveral. The US research activity in terms of rocketry, as based on the use of German V2 augmented with a probing rocket like a second-stage -which were known under the name of 'Bumper'- mostly was connected to the development of long-range cruise missiles, with those rockets designed designed to go on a flat trajectory, gathering some data about hypersonic flight in the upper atmosphere. After the first Russian atomic bomb in September 1949 and intelligence in late 1953 showing that the Soviet ICBM program was well on its way, it was becoming clear that the Russians had the means of delivering an atomic warhead against the continental USA. On the Soviet side, German scientists worked with the 'Department 7' as working upon the V2, the Soviet engineers developed the R-type missiles. The Soviet Council of Ministers had ordered the construction of the R-1 rocket as soon as by May 1946, building upon rockets found in Germany by the end of WWII. That has since been considered by many in the Russian space industry to be the onset of the Soviet and Russian space programs as that decision led to the creation of many of the institutes which would go on to create other Soviet rocket. Soviet missiles were due to engineer Korolyov as they were 4 times more powerful than their U.S. counterparts. This perception of a "missile gap" was emphasized notably by then-US Senator John Kennedy as it changed the public and governmental attitude towards the satellites and rocketry. At the same time, the public was considering too that there was a gap between USSR and the USA in the areas of science and engineering, generally. In 1955, President Eisenhower directed that the Atlas ICBM Air Force project becomes a priority, as the idea developed of placing a satellite in orbit as part of the International Geophysical Year 1957-58. It was the Navy Vanguard project which was selected because its was more closely related to the international research community. USA promoted a policy of "Space for Peace". The real purpose of the satellites however was to maintain the aptitude to monitor the Russian activities in the vast Russian heartland. In 1957, both the USA and the USSR had the capability of reaching orbit. The first Soviet ICBM launched in August 1957, as a new US Army, "Jupiter C", tactical missile had traveled 3,000 miles (4,800 km) downrange in September 1956. Russia had a slight advantage however. As soon as September 1956, they were so confident into the success of their SS6 ICBM that they publicly announced that they would launch an artificial satellite for the International Geophysical Year

Hugh L. Dryden was one of the men instrumental into leading the USA into the access to space. He had studied at the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under Professor Joseph Ames, founding member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Its Ph.D. about air flows won him the post of Chief of the Aerodynamics Section of the National Bureaus of Standards, with the US most advanced wind tunnels which worked with NACA's grants. Dryden also developped a close relationship with Theodore von Kármán, the founder of the JPL, as Dryden inspected European science facilities by the end of WWII, including intense debriefings of German rocket scientists. He was the general editor for the seminal 'Toward New Horizons' Scientific Advisory Group report, which set the agenda for post-war research for both military and civilian efforts in air, and space flight! By 1947, Dryden became the director of the NACA, pursuing high-speed flight and space research. He brokered the arrangement with the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy that led to the creation of the hypersonic X-15. He was also the key facilitator in creating the National Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan that resolved industry and military service disputes over the creation of the family of supersonic and hypersonic wind tunnels. By 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik, NACA already had turned into a de facto space agency. The NACA conducted aeronautical research, lessons of which were transfered to the nascent aerospace industry and, in the 1950s, as pilots were piloting experimental vehicles like the X-15 to the edge of space, NACA engineers began thinking about sending humans into space and the agency developed a plan that called for a blunt-body spacecraft that would reenter with a heat shield, a worldwide tracking network, and dual controls that would gradually give the pilot of the craft greater control. As some senior members of Congress held Dryden responsible for the Sputnik surprise, Dryden was not named as the director of the new NASA agency, but Deputy Administrator as the director had accepted the post only on that condition. Dryden was instrumental into the rapid development of Project Mercury, other human spaceflight programs, and science at NASA. In the spring of 1961, Dryden also played a critical role in convincing Vice President Johnson and President Kennedy that a human mission to the Moon was a feasible goal for the 1960s. Dryden was also charged with leading negotiations with the Soviet Union on space cooperation based upon his international standing and previous encounters with Soviet scientific leaders through his membership in a wide variety of international professional societies and a very first space cooperation agreement with the USSR was signed in 1962. He died of cancer in 1965. Dryden also served as a very active lay Methodist minister

The Concept of 'Military-industrial Complex'
The space age was affected by the concept of 'military-industrial complex,' which points, in a given country, to processes and financial relationships linking lawmakers, public institutions, the military and contractors of the industrial sector, which makes that such a complex is controlling, at least, the country's politics in terms of what is concerning it. The term was originally coined by U.S President Dwight D. Eisenhower who, by the end of his mandate, stressed the threats such a permanent complex in the U.S.A. was posing to democracy as it was, finally, structured into a cartel. In the U.S.A. further the term 'Iron Triangle' also is used, meaning that collusion between contractors, the Pentagon and the U.S. government. The 20th century was dominated during the Cold War, since 1945 by both the military-industrial complex of the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The Cold War, as soon as by its beginnings, turned a competition in terms of nuclear ballistic missiles as both camps further integrated the space race into, which was to provide technological advances in both countries. Even the Internet was a subproduct of the Cold War. Space age, on the other hand, also was indebted to the technologies Germans had developed by the end of WW2. Early jet fighters like the Me-262, ballistic rockets like the V1 and V2, suborbital and orbital projects -like the solar mirror beam, for example- all had brought Germany to about 5 to 10 years from the access to space, manned spaceflight included. As Allied benefitted from such a technology and engineers (the most renowned being Wernher Von Braun) -and Russian did in a lesser measure- one can say that the space age was also mostly the realization of German projects into reality, until the U.S. lunar Apollo program. Of note that some of the German engineers brought to the USA -- in total they were 200 coming from Pennemunde -- had been implied into Nazi war crimes or that the ones who participated into the Apollo program were put aside by the program's end. On a other hand, it's a fact that the aerospace industry led the U.S. economy into the late 20th century

As the Soviet Sputnik endeavour originates well into the Cold War between USSR and the USA with the Russian, intercontinental missile R-7 (the latest of the R type) being powerful -to the orbit- by a lack of miniaturization of their nuclear warheads -and the fact that the Soviets lacked a effective bomber force of their own- the logics which led to the launch of the first artifical satellite of the Earth, is part politics and part individualistic. The Soviet H-bomb device, which was firt detonated in 1953 weighed 7 tons, and as it could be delivered by existing Tu-16 strategic bombers, the Soviet leadership also allowed the development of a intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering those. The U.S. H-bomb, as far as it was concerned, on the other hand, at 54 tons, was not actually a deliverable weapon. As the chief-engineer of the Russian space program, Sergei Korolyov knew that the US scientists were aiming, with their Vanguard project, to launch a satellite at the occasion of the International Geophysic Year, he seized the opportunity of the technologial lead the USSR had with the R-7 to be the first to have an artificial satellite in orbit! Korolyov obtained the agreement of the Kremlin by January 1956 to do so as the military, on the other hand, wanted the missiles to be reserved to their sole, army' use. Korolyov however trimmed the official project down, to the Sputnik one (which he called the 'PS-1' one -for 'Prosteishiy Sputnik', 'most simplified satellite'). The sole interest of the Russian space scientists just became, from that moment, to beat the USA, by accessing the first to the Earth's orbit. That, thus, was done by constructing the Sputnik in less than 3 months as the launch date -Oct. 4, 1957- was eventually determined by reference to that they thought that a U.S. launch was to occur by about the same time. The launch originally had been planned on October 6th but Korolyov though that the USA were going to try a launch on October 5th! The KGB, the Soviet secret service, did not confirm the feat however. Korolyov thus didn't take any chance as he canceled the last tests and he advanced the launch date by 2 days, on October 4th. Two days before launch, on the other hand, unproper welding work had caused some trouble with the battery of the Sputnik which had to be fixed. The launch took place from the steppes of Kazakstan. The Sputnik satellite was weighing 185 lbs (90 kg) as it had been built in 3 months. It was a pressurized aluminum alloy sphere, bearing two radio transmitters and 4 antennas. Korolyov had chosen the spheric shape by reference to the sphericity of the Earth. Its polished surface was aimed to dissipate better the heat which was to be yielded by the Sun rays upon the satellite. The official science objective of the Sputnik were to test the method of placing a artificial satellite into Earth orbit, provide information on the density of the atmosphere by calculating the satellite's lifetime in orbit, test radio and optical methods of orbital tracking, determine the effects of radio wave propagation though the atmosphere, and check principles of pressurization used on the satellites. The Sputnik, as it had been launched atop a SS6 Sapwood Soviet missile, kept emitting its bips during 3 weeks, which were aimed to the radioamateurs, and then it kept orbiting during 3 months. Its two first orbits over the USA had went undetected! He then de-orbited self due to the atmospheric drag as it had scoured a total of 1,400 orbits. The Sputnik satellite performed one orbit in 100 minute! The Soviet state-run media, the Pravda had writtent that the satellite could be seen naked-eye. But the public, in fact, just saw the launcher's second stage as it had too reached the orbit and which followed thus the same orbit than the Sputnik! The Soviet leaders -Kruschchev himself and even the members of Korolyov's team- just first considered the Sputnik like a Russian achievement among others, with the official Pravda daily have the new deep inside and on the bannerline two days after only, when they had seen the reaction triggered in the world by the feat! The Russian leaders, on the other hand, did not even trust that their scientists could beat the USA in that space run. It seems well that the Sputnik victory was a mix of individual initiative, technological opportunity and political rally only, a mix which was found back, few later, with the Moon race. As Kruschchev found no interest in it, Brezhnev, his successor, did better but, the Russian Moon endeavour was underfunded and hampered by conflicting views between Korolyov and other scientists, with the launchers and the electronics technology of the Russians inferior at that of the USA. The name of Korolyov and of his team's members became a state secret during 50 years in the USSR, for the Soviet people self included which never had knowledge of those! The Soviet officials present Leonid Sedov, who was a member of the USSR's Academy of Sciences, like the father to the Sputnik. Korolyov was only authorized to keep publishing his science, non-sensitive works but under the disguised name of 'K. Sergeyev'. Kruschchev even refused the proposal of the Nobel Prize Comittee to nominate Korolyov for the prize, as he considered, on the one hand, that the Sputnik was a collective success of the USSR and that, on the other hand, if he had singularized one of the Russian space scientists among the others, that, in the communist mood of the country, would have vexed those and, further, that would have risked to hamper and slow the Soviet space program and, above all, the one of the Soviet ballistic missiles. That decision however hurted Korolyov as his name was known to the West -and to the high-ranking Russian officials- by 1960 only, when he died. Korolyov's house, in Moscow, nowadays is a museum dedicated in honor to him. The Soviet military participated into the Sputnik affair, up to the launch and monitoring as those branch gave birth to nowadays's Russian Space Forces

Another founding fathers of the Soviet space program was Polish-born Boris Yevseyevich Chertok, died 2011, who had joined by 1946 the NII-88 institute as head of the control systems department. He there worked hand-in-hand with famed Chief Designer Sergey Korolev and became one of his closest aides in developing control systems for ballistic missiles and spacecraft. He eventually became deputy chief designer of the famous OKB-1, the design organization that spun off from NII-88 in 1956 and was responsible for a remarkable string of space firsts of the early Soviet space program. Chertok participated in every major project at OKB-1, now the S.P. Korolev Rocket and Space Corporation Energia, until his retirement from active work in 1991. Among his many contributions to the Russian space industry, he was closely involved in the launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957 and the first human spaceflight by Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961

As soon as by 1955, CIA Director Allen Dulles warned Defense Secretary Charles Wilson that '[t]he nation that first successfully launches the earth satellite, and thereby introduces the age of space travel, will gain incalculable international prestige and recognition'. A succesfull satellite further would have a significant 'psychological impact' on US allies, neutral countries and, what is more important, 'Communist-controlled countries'. The CIA however had remained uncertain about Soviets' progresses as by 1956 it estimated a first satellite by 1958 and a more elaborated one not before 1963. But, by June 1957, Moscow was deemed to launch its first satellite in 1957 and maybe around solstice times for cause of better observation conditions. A 50 percent chance of failure was stated. A satellite with substantial military reconnaissance capabilities was to launch in 1963-1965. The CIA had access to open sources, like international conferences, for example, or data obtain from intelligence, like the names of Soviet secret facilities

Space Premieres

the Sputnik prepared for launch. picture courtesy NASA/Asif A. Siddiqi

The space age was thus inaugurated on October 4th, 1957 when the USSR eventually reached the orbit with its Sputnik, a satellite launched aboard a SS6 Sapwood ICBM. Sputnik, which means "Traveler" in Russian, became the Earth's first artificial satellite, just opening of the Space Age! Next November 3, 1957, for the 4Oth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution, its was Sputnik 2, carrying a living dog, Laika, and weighing 1,119 pounds -significantly more than the first Sputnik- which reached a low Earth orbit. The craft remained attached to its booster rocket after achieving orbit. That little bastard she-dog had been picked up in the streets of Moscow and named Leika, which means 'small barker' in Russian. The flight had been hurriedly prepared to take advantage of the propaganda value of the first Soviet satellite. The dog eventually died after 5 hours of flight likely for cause of dehydration and intense stress (the Soviets officially declared that Laika had died willingly poisoned to avoid it the sufferings during the atmospheric reentry as, due to the lack of adequate development time, no provisions were made to recover Laika. Engineers had not designed the environmental control system for a lengthy mission). On November 10, the satellite’s batteries expired, and receipt of data from the science experiments also ceased. Sputnik 2 burned up on reentry on April 14, 1958. It would be nearly three years before the Soviet Union orbited more animals, this time returning the entire 'crew' safely to Earth, the first steps in preparation for human space flight. The Sputnik 2 flight in any case, was a step further which hinted at the Russian possibility of orbiting and de-orbiting a nuclear weapon at will! The event on the other hand, began to galvanize the United States into organizing their own space program, and husher them into a manned program. As the US Congress already had gotten alarmed by the Sputnik demonstration of the Soviet scientific superiority -the Sputnik's launch was termed a 'science Pearl Harbor' by the U.S. media- all the American programs were accelerated and, on January 31st, 1958, a Army Jupiter C, or Juno 1 launched "Explorer I", the first American satellite. Sputnik’s launch and then the other success of the of the Laïka dog led the U.S. government to focus and consolidate space exploration programs in different agencies. A attempt, three months earlier had had the launcher to fly a mere four feet above the ground before tumbling back. In the US, there were two separate efforts to try to achieve reaching the orbit. During that era of Cold War, it had not yet been determined whether the sovereignty of a nation's borders extended upward into space which led U.S. President Eisenhower to ensure that first American satellites were not perceived to be military or national security assets. JPL then primarily performed defense work for the Army. In 1954, the laboratory's engineers had begun working with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in Alabama on a project called 'Orbiter.' The Army team included Wernher von Braun and his team of engineers focusing upon the Redstone Jupiter-C rocket derived from the German V-2 missile. Once working in the US after World War II, von Braun used the V-2 to develop the Redstone intermediate range ballistic missile, from which he developed the Jupiter-C as a high-performance three-stage rocket. The addition of a fourth stage created the Juno rocket, capable of launching a satellite into orbit. JPL’s role was to prepare the three upper stages for the launch vehicle. These used solid rocket motors the laboratory had developed for the Army's Sergeant guided missile. JPL would also be responsible for receiving and transmitting the orbiting spacecraft's communications. The Jupiter-C rocket program thus was resurrected as the first fold of the US response, the Vanguard program, was accelerated. The Vanguard program belonged to the U.S. Navy (the Naval Research Laboratory) -- with the National Academy of Sciences, as it had a competitive edge in that it was not derived from a ballistic missile program. Despite the Army and the JPL's Jupiter-C rocket had made its first successful suborbital flight in 1956, it was the Navy's program was chosen to launch a satellite during the International Geophysics Year (IGY). JPL engineers however used a pre-existing rocket casing to build a flight-worthy satellite, just in case it might be needed. The launch of the Sputnik resolved the diplomatic uncertainty about the status of spaceflight, establishing the right to orbit above any territory. The Eisenhower administration kept giving the priority to the Navy's Vanguard which embarrassingly destroyed during the launch attempt on Dec. 6. The Vanguard Test Vehicle 3 (TV3) was trying to launch a a tiny 6-inch 3-pound satellite on a test flight as it rose about 4 feet into the air, but the main engine lost thrust and the rocket fell back onto the pad, exploding in a huge fireball. The press called the failed attempt 'Flopnik' and 'Kaputnik.' The Vanguard satellite was thrown free of the explosion and recovered, although because of the damage it could not be repaired for another launch attempt. It is currently on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. The US thus turned back to the Army and JPL to save the country's reputation as a technological leader. The JPL since then turned mostly to satellites instead of launchers. Thanks to its advance preparation, 84 days later, its satellite stood on the launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and was launched Jan. 31, 1958 (of note is that that date was the one of the 15th anniversary of the Soviet victory in Stalingrad during WWII in 1943). The announcement of its success was made early the next morning at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, with Pickering, Van Allen and von Braun to answer questions from the media, so to be in line with the desire to portray the launch as the fulfillment of the U.S. commitment under the International Geophysical Year. The spacecraft was given its official name, Explorer 1, only after launch. By Jan. 11, 1958, the work of assembling and testing the 30.8-pound, 6-foot, 9-inch Explorer 1 satellite was complete. The Jupiter C’s first stage was positioned at Launch Complex 26 at the Cape Canaveral Missile Annex (now Cape Canaveral Air Force Station), on Jan. 16. The rocket’s upper stages arrived at the pad on Jan. 24, and were attached to the top the rocket. On the evening of Jan. 31, a group of 57 engineers, technicians and managers monitored the countdown from the pad 26 blockhouse. Pickering, von Braun and Van Allen waited at the Pentagon. Plans called for the trio to travel to the National Academy of Sciences, where they would announce either success or failure. Once the rocket launched, contact was lost as there was not yet a far-flung network of tracking stations. Pickering stayed on the telephone with his team at JPL waiting for confirmation that Explorer 1 was successfully in orbit. If so, it would pass over a California tracking station no later than 12:30 a.m. EST early on Feb. 1. That time passed with no signal. But at 12:45 p.m. came the report that 'California has the bird.' A team of women mathematicians at JPL computed Explorer’s trajectory and were able to confirm that it was indeed in orbit around the Earth. At the news conference, Pickering, von Braun and Van Allen reported that America's first satellite was in an elliptical orbit slightly higher than planned accounting for the 15-minute delay in receiving a signal from Explorer 1. By the creation of NASA later in that year, Pickering and Caltech worked to shift JPL away from its defense work to become part of the new agency. JPL remained a division of Caltech, which manages the laboratory for NASA. The Vanguard launch failure and the inefficiency of different organizations competing for scarce resources to develop space capabilities contributed to the US government establishing a single civilian space agency, the NASA, in 1958. The first U.S. a successfull launch came as the outcome of a 83-day work by a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team in coordination with the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency, which had been led by the JPL director, William H. Pickering. Explorer 1 launched from the gantry of the Launch Complex 26 of the Patrick AFB, at Cape Canaveral, as the Jupiter C launcher had been developed by Wernher von Braun. That first U.S. satellite only had like a science payload a cosmic rays detector which was meant to discover what soon became the Van Allen Belts. Explorer 1 had a elliptical orbit ranging from 220 to 1,563 miles (354-2515 km). It performed one orbit in 114,8 minute, which was worth 12.5 orbits a day. The Explorer 1 only was 80 by 6.25 inches (2,03 m-15,9 cm) and a weight of 30.8 lbs (14 kg). The mission terminated on May 23rd, 1958 as the orbiter eventually re-entered the Earth's atmosphere in March 1970 only, burning over the Pacific Ocean! It had continued to transmit data for about four months, until its batteries were exhausted. Explorer 1 re-entered Earth's atmosphere and burned up on March 31, 1970, after more than 58,000 orbits. Five Explorer were launched then as two failed to reach orbit. Further, a Navy Vanguard satellite -as that program had been transfered to NASA- successfully reached orbit on March 17th, 1958. World’s first solar-powered satellite, a Vanguard 1 had been designed to test the launch capabilities of a three-stage launch vehicle and the effects of the environment on a satellite and its systems in Earth orbit. Vanguard 1 was the second U.S. satellite in orbit, essentially identical to its hapless predecessor, following Explorer 1, and it remains the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth to this day as contact had been lost by 1964. The Vanguard 1 determined that the Earth is not a perfect sphere but is somewhat asymmetrical in what has been described as pear-shaped. A series of Explorers was launched, as they completed various technological premieres like the first tape recorder to transmit data when within range of a ground station, the measurement of a high altitude nuclear explosion, the study of the Sun, the study of X-rays from the Sun and their impact on the ionosphere, or the identification of the particles constituting cosmic rays. The Explorer 1's cosmic rays detector had indicated a much lower cosmic rays count than expected as scientist Van Allen postulated that the instrument was giving these readings because it was actually saturated by energetic charged particles originating mainly in the Sun and trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. The discovery of these trapped radiation belts, subsequently named after Van Allen, was considered one of the outstanding scientific discoveries of the IGY. The Van Allen Bets were further explored through the Explorer 3 launched in March of 1958. That series of Explorer satellites allowed too to check that the space and the magnetosphere were safe places to astronauts. To permit a more unified way to space, President Eisenhower eventually adopted in June 1958 the National Aeronautics and Space Act. The U.S. Congress had passed the act after lengthy committee hearings. NASA, effective October 1st, 1958, just became the -civilian- core of U.S. space research and launch. The USA too answered Soviet access to space or ballistic missiles with its own ballistic and antiballistic missiles programs, moving from the radar system used since WWII to a electronic phase of small radar beams rotated electronically. The early technology of space had not reached a high development point yet with engineers, for example, using vacuum tubes in rockets instead of transistors

->About the Sputnik 3
Soviet Chief Designer Sergey P. Korolyov had been working on a 'Object D project' for two years, as part of the Soviet Union’s response to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) to study the near Earth environment by launching a scientific satellite. But faced with the competition with Americans Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev ordered the Chief Designer to come up with the simpler Sputnik, which launched by October 1957. Khrushchev then, as he saw the political benefit of Sputnik, ordered Korolyov to quickly launch Sputnik 2 in November 1957, this time with she-dog Laika on board. Satisfied that the Soviets were now well ahead of the Americans, Khrushchev left Korolyov resume his work on Object D. Being prudent, he decided to build two satellites. The launch of Object D, on April 27, 1958, from the Baykonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, started off well enough, but about 90 seconds into the flight, the rocket disintegrated in flames and came crashing back to Earth. Miraculously, the satellite survived the crash nearly intact, but when engineers returned it to the launch site, a fire caused by a electrical short circuit nearly destroyed it. Undaunted, Korolyov prepared backup Object D for flight, and readied it for launch on following May 15. All unfolded well that time, and Sputnik 3 entered its planned elliptical orbit around the Earth, becoming the sixth artificial satellite in the Space Age -- after its two Soviet predecessors and the three satellites that the Americans had launched in early 1958. At 2,926 pounds it was by far the heaviest satellite ever orbited, carrying 12 battery-powered instruments to study the Earth’s upper atmosphere, magnetic fields, radiation environment and cosmic dust. The various instruments collected data for one week to one month, but unfortunately the onboard tape recorder failed shortly after launch, precluding the recording of data during critical parts of the spacecraft’s orbit when it passed through what are now known as the Van Allen trapped radiation belts. Sputnik 3 reentered the Earth’s atmosphere on April 6, 1960 and disintegrated. Its telemetry transmitter and scintillation counter, both powered by experimental silicon solar batteries, operated until the end. That other Soviet success representend a strong additional impetus for the passage of the National Aeronautics and Space Act in July 1958, as, in response to the first Sputniks, a congressional consensus had appeared in the U.S.A. that a civilian agency should be established to run the American space program

At the time, it was unsure whether the U.S. space was to be governed by a new agency, a one built upon a already established institution like the the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Or whether it should be part of a military agency, as such a option was favoured by the Army and the Air Force. Or if it should include aeronautical activities. Or how the agency should related to the USA's foreign policy. What eventually resulted was the NASA, a more unified way to space, which President Eisenhower eventually adopted in June 1958 the National Aeronautics and Space Act. NASA, effective October 1st, 1958. NASA just became the -civilian- core of U.S. space research and launch. T. Keith Glennan turned NASA's first Administrator until in January 1961, and thus presided over the organization that had absorbed the earlier NACA and three major research laboratories, namely the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia, the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in California and the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Ohio. He also soon brought in part of the Naval Research Laboratory forming the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. In December 1958, NASA acquired the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in California and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Alabama transferred to NASA in 1960, becoming the Marshall Space Flight Center. On the one hand, some think that the creation of NASA eventually was a saltation with the creation, in the USA, of a technocratic institution, which institutionalized technological change for state purposes with a state-funded and-managed R&D explosion! Other historians consider, at the opposite, that technocratic ideas of the relation of science to the state were already well established by this time, stressing in particular the parallels between the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA. From such a view, NASA was better a engine of the US international prestige in the 1960's, which was rooted in atomic diplomacy, as certain debates in Congress about the new agency were largely approached from within a framework of atomic energy, thereby limiting the range of discourse and influencing the shape of the new agency. Sections of the National Aeronautics and Space Act that were inspired by the Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954, especially the relation of the Department of Defense to the new agency, the role of international cooperation, and the apportionment of intellectual property. It's about certain that political debates, on the other hand, surrounded that effort, which is made clear from the section 102 of the final Space Act giving those objectives to the new agency, the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space; the improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles; the development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space; the establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes; the preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere; the making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency; cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof; the most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities and equipment. Such terms are well showing the tradeoff which likely was forced upon the administration in a context of potential political feuds or maybe too a neat influence of some specific ideology, with such concepts like 'peaceful and scientific purposes', 'cooperation [...] with other nations and groups of nations', or the question of the relations between the NASA and the military. Generally, one may say that the Russian challenge of the Sputnik launch that triggered an unprecedented push in the United States to educate the nation's youth in science and mathematics with, for example, Congress passing in 1958 the National Defense Education Act to provide scholarships for aspiring scientists, engineers and mathematicians. Other contributions from the Russian challenge were more subtile, encouraging scientists in all disciplines to entertain new ideas. Mathematicians also participated into devicing the computer software needed for the space program, including the guidance and control computer software for the Jupiter C program which launched the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I

In the details, by Nov. 25, 1957, Dem. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson began hearings on the American space and missile activities inside the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, leading, on Feb. 6, 1958, to the establishment of a Senate Special Committee on Space and Aeronautics, the goal of which was the establisment of a space agency. Senator Johnson became its chairman. In the Congress, a Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration was created on March 5 and chaired by House majority leader, Rep. John W. McCormack. Johnson asked Legislative Reference Service national defense analyst Eilene Galloway to summarize the Congressional testimony in a report titled 'The Problems of Congress in Formulating Outer Space Legislation.' In the report, Galloway outlined four options: establish a new government agency, assign the program to the Atomic Energy Commission, establish the US aeronautical agency for aeronautics, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) as the controlling agency, or assign space to the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. As far as the White House was concerned, President Eisenhower had asked his science advisor, James R. Killian, Jr., to convene the Presidential Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) for deliberations on the subject and, byMarch 5, 1958, Eisenhower had approved a memorandum, dated the same day and signed by Nelson Rockefeller, chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization, on which Killian also served, proposing a civilian space agency built around the NACA. The NACA or the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the U.S. agency dedicated to aeronautics dating back to 1915, at a time when US leaders were concerned the U.S. was losing its edge in aviation technology to Europe, where World War 1 was raging on, was actually spending then about half its total effort on space-related projects, including the Vanguard, X-15, or Defense Department missile programs. In the following weeks legislation was drafted by the Bureau of the Budget, NACA and Killian’s office. People of the time remember that there was no source for drafting such a new legislation. Finally, what emerged was the will to a new agency rather than a updated NACA -- even if the latter really was the the nucleus of NASA -- as the institution was deemed by some too lethargic to deal with the new pace of the events. Although a former military commander, U.S. President Eisenhower believed a civilian agency would be more effective than assigning space to the military, where inter-service rivalries had already demonstrated a lack of results in launching a satellite. Based upon that drafted legislation, Eisenhower, on April 2, 1958, sent the draft legislation to Congress establishing the 'National Aeronautics and Space Agency.' based on the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), to oversee the US space program. Twelve days later both the Senate and the House introduced versions of a bill to establish such an organization, with hearings beginning the next day. Scientists pushed President Eisenhower, on the other hand, to make any new agency charged with overseeing space exploration a civilian agency, fearing military control would mean research only into military priorities. At the behest of Eilene Galloway, who worked for the Congressional Research Service and served as a consultant to both Senator Johnson and Congressman McCormack during the drafting of the final Space Act, the name was changed to 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration.' It was her belief that an "Administration" with an "Administrator" would be vested with more power than a mere 'agency' with a 'director,' as a administration was the best solution to the problem of coordinating the space programs and other executive agencies. The Soviet launch in May of the nearly 3,000-pound Sputnik 3 had provided strong incentive for the bill's approval by the House and Senate as the House bill passed on June 2 and the Senate one on June 16. As the House had favored a relatively weak committee advising the agency's director, a stronger policy board was wished by the Senate. A bipartisan panel chaired by Johnson retained the strong policy board, which Eisenhower opposed. To break the impasse, the President and Johnson met on Monday following the July 4th holiday with the latter recommending that the President chair the board; Eisenhower agreed. Dr. Eilene Marie Galloway, who was part of the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congres, was asked by U.S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson to help with Congressional hearings that led to the creation of NASA. She helped write the legislation, emphasizing international cooperation and peaceful exploration. Galloway later worked too about treaties governing the exploration and uses of outer space, like the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, launching the field of space law and international space law. She worked then with the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and was also instrumental in creating the International Institute of Space Law (IISL), which serves as the forum for legal scholars, worldwide. Also instrumental into the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 was general counsel the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), Paul G. Dembling. He stated by 1992 that, if 'a lot of the policy aspects of it were done quickly, [...] the functions and the authorities that were embodied in that piece of legislation were well thought out and very well considered.' After Congressional hearings during spring 1958, Congress passed the final version of the bill, the National Aeronautics and Space Act, on July 16 and President Eisenhower signed it into law on July 29, 1958. The bill established eight objectives for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):

• The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
• The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles; Tea
• The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space;
• The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes;
• The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;
• The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency;
• Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof;
• The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities and equipment

(Although the Act has been amended over the years, these eight objectives still describe the major functions of NASA today). Nine months after the Sputnik, the U.S. Congress had already identified all aspects of the space problem. Instead of Hugh Dryden, the head of the NACA, named the administrator of NASA, it was T. Keith Glennan – the President of Case Institute of Technology since 1947 and a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission – who was sworn in at the White House as NASA's first Administrator, on August 19th, with Hugh L. Dryden as his Deputy Administrator, and Richard E. Horner the Associate Administrator, a team which lasted until in 1960. NASA formally opened for business on Oct. 1, 1958. NASA’s first, temporary Headquarters and office space were located at the Dolley Madison House, in Washington D.C. Thousands of engineers, human computers, technicians and support staff coming from the NACA expanded their vision to include flight through and beyond Earth's atmosphere. The National Space Council, a group meant to coordinate space-policy activities among government agencies and departments, first constituted in 1958, has been active sporadically, most recently between 1989 and 1993. Since then, space policy has been primarily run out of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and NASA

->About George W. Lewis
George W. Lewis was the first Executive Officer of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA). He was born in 1882. He completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies in mechanical engineering at Cornell University. Like the Engineer-In-Charge at Clarke-Thompson Research in Philadelphia since 1917, he had his first interaction with the NACA, making a research proposal on a type of two-cycle internal combustion engine. He eventually developed a wide range of interest into components of the aeronautical science, like a adequate understanding of aerodynamics in flight and propulsion, knowledge of which materials should be used to construct aircraft and how conditions of flight performance differ in experimental, laboratory conditions versus actual flight conditions. In 1919, Lewis was appointed NACA’s first executive officer, responsible for the day to day management of the staff and facilities of the organization under the general guidance of the Committee members. He also was appointed to take charge of the NACA’s first laboratory which was then under construction at Langley Field. He quickly became a respected leader in the field for facilitating the growth of both Langley and the NACA as a whole. The NACA grew under his direction from a handful of employees at one small lab to an organization with 3 major research centers and 6,000 employees by the time he retired in 1947. His title changed from Executive Officer to Director of Research in 1924. As time went on, the NACA spearheaded engine cowling, retractable landing gear, and new kinds of wind tunnels for more advanced flight research. More sites, which were to turn into NASA sites, like in Palo Alto, California and Cleveland, Ohio, were created due to the war threat as Lewis skill at building relationships brought strong ties between the NACA and various educational institutions. Due to a heart condition in 1947, Lewis handed the leadership of the organization over to Hugh L. Dryden and passed away a year later

. check the complete text of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, and like amended!

NASA absorbed at the time three NACA research laboratories -- the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia; Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in Mountain View, California; and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio -– as well as elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. In December 1958, NASA gained control of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Over time, the Agency established or incorporated additional centers and facilities to meet the growing needs of the U.S. space program and now reaching 10 field centers. The Army services retained a part of rocketry of their own. Most NASA facilities, launch sites, and test ranges are still today under the supervision of the Army Corps of Engineers. The Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954, which had framed for the U.S. State the researches in the domain of the atom, surely inspired the legislation taken about NASA. On those earliest days of space exploration, most calculations for early space missions were done by 'human computers,' and most of these computers were women and with other underrepresented people at a time when much of the professional world and especially technical fields were, in the USA, dominated by white men. SCORE, the first communications satellite, launched in December 1958 as, by January 1959, NASA started recruiting a corps of astronauts. The Mercury Control Center was built at the Cape Canaveral by 1957, and later renamed Mission Control. It was the U.S. first mission control for unmanned and manned space programs of NASA. That control room was dominated by a world map with a miniature spacecraft that tracked a capsule's planned flight path. Mission control functions were later transfered to Houston, Texas as the center at Kennedy provided backup for the initial launch and trajectory. The facility was eventually demolished by 2010 and its essential historic components were removed for preservation and are displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. A relation existed soon between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS, for example, helped NASA prepare the Apollo program astronauts for their geological exploration of the Moon, as the pair continues nowadays to collaborate on USGS’s Landsat 8 and 9 satellites

->The U.S.A and USSR Envisioned to Detonate A Nuclear Device at Moon About 1958!
At the Pentagon in 1958, the Armour Research Foundation, a Illinois-based institution collaborating with the US Air Force, developed Project A119 (or a 'A Study of Lunar Research Flights'), a top-secret plan looking to study the effects of detonating a nuclear device on the Moon as it had began studying the hypothetical impact of detonating a nuclear device on the Moon’s surface as early as 1949. The project’s existence remained a secret until the 1990s, when it was revealed that famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan was involved in the project. At at time when the Soviets had taken the lead in the access to space, the project was also a morale booster as the US Air Force were very interested in the possibility of a surprise demonstration explosion, along Moon's terminator, with all its obvious implications for public relations and the Cold War (it wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on Earth as the project designers could only guarantee a faintly visible explosive light to the naked eye for the general public). The project was eventually canceled by 1959, maybe mostly because such a explosion would have irradiated a large area and damaging any future exploration. The Soviets, as far as they were concerned, also envisioned a nuke detonation on Earth's moon. It was designated the 'E project.' Korolev, the leader of Russian space program and Keldysh a scientist of the USSR Academy of Sciences originated the project by January 1958 as it was approved by Soviet leader Kruschchev, who took interest in the political aspect of space exploration. The E-1 step called for getting a spacecraft to the Moon. E-2 and E-3 involved orbiting around the Moon and taking pictures of its surface. E-4 involved detonating a small nuclear charge on the lunar surface. That project indeed was mostly intended to show to the general public that the USSR was capable of landing an object on the Moon’s surface, that a rocket sent there could be seen, or the possibility of determining the composition of lunar soil. Generally, the E project was mostly about studying the conditions needed for a lunar, landing mission as a nuclear explosion could be seen from afar. Russian physicits however had the project canceled as they deemed that the explosion flash would be of a too low intensity and duration, it could no be registered on film, or that sending a nuclear device in space was not without danger as Russians didn't fully master space flights at the time. Another view is that the project was canceled at the initiative of Korolev for technical and political reasons. The signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963 and the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 prevented future exploration of the concept of detonating a nuclear device on the Moon

The space race continued between USSR and the USA. The soviet "Luna 1" successfully passed by Moon, followed by "Pioneer IV". The Army "Juno II" became instrumental in the US deep space exploration, as a further version, the Juno V was to become the Saturn I, allowing heavier payloads. As far as it was concerned, the Air Force was developing the Atlas and the Titan. In November 1959 another important step took place for the development of NASA: the Explorer program, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and numerous rocket and satellite specialists were transferred to it! TIROS 1, the first U.S. weather satellite launched April 1st, 1960. The manned program took start meanwhile as, there again, it was the Russians which won the prize in the domain! As soon as 1960 they had set up, under the direction of Korolov, the search for 'cosmonauts.' Korolev's men took on looking for the first Soviet cosmonauts as they chose, at the Army Air Force bases, 3,000 pilots of which 20 cosmonaut candidates eventually remained. Gagarin was chosen like the first Soviet cosmonaut because his size and weight were fit to the Vostock craft's limited space (at 5.4 foot-tall, his size, on the other hand had caused trouble for landing when Gagarin was following the flying school). The term 'cosmonauts,' had been intentionally chosen to distinguish from the US 'astronauts.' All of the 20 men were less than 67-inch tall. Yuri Gagarin thus, a 27-year old Soviet Air Force Senior Lieutenant pilot, became the first man to fly in orbit on April 12th, 1961. A relation father-son existed between Korolev and Gagarin, who, on a other hand, represented the typical Soviet citizen as he was issued from a family of poor peasants which had suffered during WWII. Gagarin's flight had been kept a secret until launch and even his wife knew of it through the radio only. Engineers designed, fabricated, and assembled the spacecraft and rockets to take the cosmonauts into space. The Russians successfully had launched and safely returned Earth two dogs in August 1960, Belka and Strelka, aboard the Korabl-Sputnik 2 spacecraft. In 1961 Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev was to gift one of Belka’s puppies named Pushinka to President John F. Kennedy and his family as a goodwill gesture. Two more flights of dogs and instrumented mannequins in March 1961 cleared the way for the first human spaceflight the following month. Saluted by Russia's radios with the slow, stirring beat of the patriotic song, 'How Spacious Is My Country,' Yuri Gagarin headed to his Vostok ('East' in Russian) vessel at launch pad in Baikonur, with German Titov like one of his back-up pilot (and to become pilot of Vostok 2). The rocket carrying Gagarin's Vostok 1 spacecraft blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome at 6:07 a.m. local time, prompting 'Poyekhali' ('Let's go!'), and the craft circled the Earth once before re-entering the atmosphere and landing back. It has reached a speed of 17,500 mph (28200 km/h) as the flight lasted 108 minutes and the maximum altitude of 203 miles (327 km) was reached on a non quite circular orbit. The reentry module landed on the territory of the USSR. The Soviet news agency had prepared three versions of the report on the first manned flight into space, one for a success, another calling for help in case of a return into a unmanned region or ocean, and the last in case of the death of Gagarin. Gagarin had written a farewell letter to his wife in case of an accident, which was delivered to the latter only when he died in 1968. During the flight, Gagarin was not allowed to operate the controls because the effects of weightlessness had only been tested on dogs so far and the mission was instead controlled by ground crews and an override key and code was provided in case of emergency. The mission represented another Soviet step into space, showing the USSR was able to propulse a heavy object at the needed speed of 17,500 mph -or 5 miles a second- to escape Earth's gravity. The Soviet engineers had performed a rehearsal flight a few week before, with the Vostok 3KA-2 which completed one low Earth orbit with a dummy cosmonaut aboard named Ivan Ivanovich, and a dog called Zvezdochk. The Vostok craft used for Gagarin's flight had a spherical shape, a weight of 5 tons, as it featured no retro-rockets to slow it before touchdown and first Soviet astronauts had to eject themselves at a altitude of 4 miles, and parachute land. Such a feat, as far as the first ever manned spaceflight is concerned, might have it not been regarded such as it indeed did not include a real manned landing. Soviets thus kept the detail out of the official press announcements. His historical flight however instantly made Gagarin a hero and icon in the USSR as he performed numerous goodwill tours. When Gagarin visited Britain, Queen Elizabeth II took a picture with him, contrary to etiquette as the queen explained her decision by saying that Gagarin was not an ordinary person, but a man from space. All crews launching aboard a Russian vehicle perpetuate the deeds Gagarin performed for his own launch, like he planted a tree outside Baikonur Cosmodrome, and then got a haircut two days before his flight. Some traditions were added later, such as signing the Visitor’s Book at Yuri’s office in Star City. Due to his popularity, he was not allowed any more space flight as the time as the government did not want to lose their icon. Frustrated, Yuri Gagarin went back to training aboard the MIGs. He also became the deputy training director of the cosmonaut training center, helping other cosmonauts prepare for their space flights, and successfully defended his aerospace engineering thesis on space plane design at the prestigious Zhukovski Air Force Academy. Ironically, Yuri Gagarin met his death as the Soviet authorities ultimately had allowed him for another spaceflight! He had been assigned as cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov’s backup for the first Soyuz mission. After Komarov’s death in the Soyuz 1 accident in April 1967, Soviet officials felt justified in their caution and even allowed Gagarin to fly aircraft only with a flight instructor. As he was training with his instructor, Vladimir Seryogin, in a MIG-15 fighter the poor weather conditions had both killed when the plane crash landed on March 27th, 1968. Gagarin was at the age of 35. The launch pad in Baikonur from which the Vostok toof off in April 1961 kept used during the Cold War, and still is today. After his death, many prominent space facilities were renamed in his honor. Outside of Moscow, the facility where cosmonauts train for their spaceflights, once a secret facility, was renamed the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center or, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launch pad from which Gagarin began his historic journey is known as the 'Gagarin Start.' From patriotic songs blaring on the metro in Moscow to events on the ISS or exhibitions, Russia proudly celebrated the 50th anniversary of the flight in 2011, and calling space exploration still a priority for the country, as Gagarin had been made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Even Neil Armstrong, the US astronaut first to walk on Moon said that Gagarin had 'invited us all into space.' 500 people since, of all nationalities, reached to space. Rumors of manned suborbital flights which had preceded the one by Yuri Gagarin surfaced as soon as early 1958, with cosmonauts killed and reinforced in 1959. Only sketchy data were available about the Soviet manned program, generally, with three cosmonauts, Belokonev, Kachur, and Grachev, training on a program of high altitude flights. USSR likely also proceded with fake manned flights before Gagarin's. Rumors of killed cosmonauts during the early Soviet manned program were mostly due to distorted presentation by Soviet news managers as officials did not deny. USSR always kept secretive about its space missions, as they were not announced until successfully taken off or details sparse and often misleading. The US response to Gagarin's deed was carried on by the 'Project Mercury', a group of seven men (Slayton, Schirra, Cooper, Carpenter, Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard), USA's first astronauts. The Project Mercury eventually consisted of three manned flights, two suborbital flights -by Alan Shepard on May 5th, 1961, aboard Freedom 7, a Mercury 3 capsule and by Virgil Grissom on July 21st, 1961- and the first actual US orbital flight, which was performed by Major John Glenn on February 20th, 1962. U.S.A. then knew they were in a competitive situation as NASA however never permitted the pressure to make take risks that might endanger Shepard's life during the surborbital flight or the success of the mission. The country, the whole 'free world' needed that flight, deciders thought at the time. The suborbital flights had been performed atop a Redstone rocket, a one which was extremely reliable but not strong enough to send a person into orbit. The first U.S. orbital flight was the job thus of the Atlas, originally a missile whose strength was without question, but whose reliability was wanting. The Mercury astronauts followed the Atlas development and eventually flew aboard with no qualm. For its orbital flights, NASA used the more powerful Atlas rocket. And instead of dogs like the Russian had used, U.S. scientists used chimpanzees in the precursor flights before declaring the system safe for humans. On Jan. 31, 1961, Mercury-Redstone 2 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the chimpanzee Ham who completed a 16-minute 39-second suborbital flight. He was safely recovered by the USS Donner in the Atlantic Ocean in good condition, clearing the way for Shepard’s flight three months later. On Nov. 29, 1961, the chimpanzee Enos rode aboard Mercury-Atlas 5, completed two orbits around the Earth, and was safely recovered by the USS destroyer Stormes. Despite some technical issues with the spacecraft, the flight cleared the way for Glenn’s orbital mission two months later. The Soviet premier, Kruschev, himself had tried to symbolically stress the advance of his country as he offered the U.S. president Eisenhower, during a visit to him, a copy of the steal sphere a Luna probe had taken with it while intentionally crashing on Moon and asking when the American flag would rival there the Soviet one. The U.S.A., however, under their new president Kennedy, pushed the response to the challenge a knot higher, as Kennedy pronounced his famous May 25th, 1961 adress, announcing that America was to send manned missions to Moon before the decade's end. It looks like it was vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson who proposed the bold idea when asked by Kennedy to find a project which would boost the then tarnished image of the USA in the world, generally. In 1961 indeed Kennedy had asked his vice president Lyndon Johnson, 'What should the U.S. do? What goals should we pursue? What can we beat the Russians at?' and they studied a number of options. One of them was a Moon landing. Another one was a space station because the Russians had these very large rockets and could launch space stations at the time already. But because they would need a larger rocket still to the Moon, Kennedy opted for the Moon like a target for U.S. space. Lyndon B Johnson since 1958, was well aware of the strategic aspect of space dominance. 'Control of space means control of the world, far more certainly, far more totally than any control that has ever or could ever be achieved by weapons, or by troops of occupation ... That is the ultimate position — the position of total control over the Earth,' did he state. That adress was pronounced few after that the first suborbital flight of project Mercury took place in April 1961. The USA thus, at the time, even did not have perform a single orbit around the Earth! The race's pace thus was changing. The USA were now targeting the Moon. That Kennedy move kept seeing space like a geopolitical stake as it finally aimed to the US supremacy in rocketry and space against the USSR, and with defense implications as rockets used for the space conquest also were to improve sending nuclear weapons across intercontinental distances. A Gallup poll soon after the speech showed 58 percent of the public opposed the plan. After that during the 60's, approval ratings for Project Apollo struggled, only one poll, taken in July 1969, showed that 53 percent of Americans considered going to the Moon was worth the expense. President Kennedy reiterated his message by September 12th, 1962, with a presidential address at Rice University, in the football field, given during a trip to tour NASA facilities. He elaborated the rationale for his lunar objective. Space was a 'new frontier,' a 'new sea' in the next great age of discovery. The conquest of space, a historic and strategic imperative, would challenge Americans to show their greatness and would signal national prestige and global leadership. Invoking the competition of the space race, the speech nevertheless transcended the Cold War by emphasizing a romantic and visionary national quest. It stressed how practical and technological greatness could mix with the noblest goals of human aspiration. It provided a chronology of urgency: 'We meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance,' or '... we set sail on his new sea because there is a new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. ... Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. But I do say space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made with extending his writ around this globe of ours. ...There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountian? Why - 35 years ago - why fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon, we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one in which we intend to win, and the others too.' The push which turned public under Kennedy really had been initiated under Eisenhower by Lyndon Johnson who was a real pusher, warning against any superiority USSR might gain in space. Once Kennedy elected, he was nominated the head of the National Space Council. Kennedy’s attitude toward the space program was complex. He entered the White House thinking space could be an area for tension-reducing cooperation with the Soviet Union, and he never gave up that hope. At his June 3-4, 1961, summit meeting in Vienna with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for example, Kennedy suggested, 'Why don’t we do it together?' After first responding positively, the next day Khrushchev said 'no' on the grounds that an agreement on disarmament must come first. Kennedy repeated the invitation at the United Nations shortly before he was killed. Near the end of his presidency, Kennedy returned to that idea of superpower cooperation in space. Speaking before the United Nations on Sept. 20, 1963, he proposed 'a joint expedition to the Moon' and asked, 'why should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?' As the Berlin stand-off or the Cuban missile crises, and so on blunted efforts at a cooperation, Kennedy's vision by autumn 1963, was to form an Apollo program that would build bridges between the two superpowers, instead of heightening cold-war rivalries, and he spoke of sending scientists to the Moon as representatives of all countries, not of a single nation. By that time, Khrushchev had started to think the idea had merit, but Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963 put a end to any move. Still, cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union in space remained a constant subtext throughout the cold war. The decision to have the U.S.A. to enter into the Moon race on their own came in the aftermath of the huge global and domestic reaction to the April 12, 1961 Soviet launch of the first human to orbit Earth, Yuri Gagarin. Eight days later, Kennedy asked for a crash review to identify a 'space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win.' As part of the crash review that the president had ordered, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson met with, among others, Wernher von Braun. After that meeting, von Braun wrote a letter saying of a moon landing goal, 'We have a sporting chance. With an all-out crash program I think we could accomplish this objective in 1967-68.' Johnson quickly reported this judgment to Kennedy, and in effect the die was cast. In the immediate aftermath of his speech of May 25th, 1961, NASA’s budget was increased by 89 percent, and by another 101 percent the following year. To carry out the Apollo program, NASA became the large engineering organization that it is today, and focused on manned spaceflights. Kennedy was particularly drawn to the astronauts, who became popular symbols of an administration that embraced the New Frontier. John Glenn, for example, was a frequent visitor to the Kennedys' Hyannisport, Mass., compound. Instrumental into the development of NASA's manned Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, and even the Space Shuttle was the rocket plane X-15 program, a joint program between the U.S. Air Force, NASA, the U.S. Navy, and the plane-building company North American Aviation. The research techniques used for the X-1 program had become the pattern for all subsequent X-craft projects, including the X-15 experimental aircraft for hypersonic flight research built by North American Aviation. NASA conducted the X-15 project with the Air Force and the Navy between 1959 and 1968. Similar to the X-1 under the B-29, the X-15 was carried into the air under the wing of a B-52 and after release ignited its rocket engine to begin it supersonic flight. Twelve pilots from NASA, the Air Force, the Navy and North American made 199 flights in three X-15 aircraft, some of them surpassing by some 10 miles the 50-mile U.S.A.F. border of space as it had been developed to provide in-flight information and data on aerodynamics, structures, flight controls and the physiological aspects of high-speed, high-altitude flight. A follow-on program even used the aircraft as testbeds to carry various scientific experiments beyond the Earth's atmosphere on a repeated basis. As related to the X-15, the NACA developed a plan that called for a blunt-body spacecraft that would reenter with a heat shield, a worldwide tracking network, and dual controls that would gradually give the pilot of the craft greater control

. check the text of the President Kennedy May 25th, 1961 lunar speech, as the complete speech is found at the JFK Library site!

The 1960's

a Apollo command module above the Moon. picture courtesy NASA

As a Russian two-spacecraft mission took place in 1962, and as 1963 was the year to a long-duration mission (Vostok 5) and to the first woman in space (a Russian, Valentina Tereshkova, in a Vostok 6), March 1965 was another Russian premiere too, with the first spacewalk (by Aleksei Leonov; he had trouble to get back into his capsule as his spacesuit had inflated in space due to the respiratory system and he could get in only through leaking air out of the suit). U.S. flights, as far as they were concerned, shifted from the Mercury program to the Gemini one. The Gemini program was to help for the U.S. morale about their space program as the spacewalk of astronaut Ed White gave a impulse and the space rendezvous between to Gemini capsules was the U.S. space first. The Gemini program, with its two-seat capsule, served as the essential bridge between the Mercury flights and the Apollo program. The Gemini program encompassed 10 flights, from March 1965 to November 1966, testing out rendezvous and docking techniques, and spacewalks, that would prove crucial for the lunar program, as it also tested long-duration flights. The Gemini program, thus laid the groundwork for the Apollo program to the Moon. The Apollo program had fallen under massive criticism in 1963 from all political wings as being far too expensive as people did not think the benefits would justify the expense, or $155 billion in 2011 dollars over eight years. The Bureau of the Budget only, now Office of Management and Budget, was Apollo's greatest defender. A decision to stop building Saturn V rockets was made in 1967, when Lyndon Johnson was president. The Russians, now, confronted to the Moon challenge opposed by the USA, were becoming obliged to change their mind, as they had started the 1960's with a prestige policy and they were now obliged to build a lunar program of their own. And they failed! As the idea of reaching to the Moon had started as early as 1955, and that the Luna 1 missed the Moon in 1959, the Luna 2 crashed on the satellite in 1960 or the Luna 3, in 1961 had taken photos the Soviet military had swiftly refocused the Russian space program unto army targets and thus unto Earth. The space was a patriotic item for the Soviets like Luna 2 had been packed with metal pendants bearing the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union as the impact scattered them across the lunar regolith. The other major cause of the Russian failure seems to have been that they could not develop a new, more powerful, booster. The Soviet human lunar program received formal government approval in 1964. On Nov. 25, 1967, less than three weeks after the first Saturn 5 flight during the Apollo 4 mission, the Soviets rolled out an N1 rocket to the newly constructed launch pad 110R at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Kazakhstan. This particular rocket, designated 1M1 and also called the Facilities Systems Logistic Test and Training Vehicle, was actually a mockup and designed to give engineers valuable experience in the rollout, launch pad integration and rollback activities. The Russian N1 made the trip horizontally and was then raised to the vertical at the pad -- a standard practice in the Soviet space program. On Dec. 11, after completion of various tests, the N1 rocket was lowered and rolled back to the assembly building. The 1M1 mockup would be used repeatedly in the coming years for additional launch pad integration tests. Although this test was carried out in secret, a U.S. reconnaissance satellite photographed the N1 on the pad shortly before its rollback to the assembly building. NASA Administrator James Webb had access to this and other similar intelligence that showed that the Russians were seriously planning manned lunar missions, which influenced several key U.S. decisions in the following months as the satellite imagery appeared to show the Soviets were close to a flight test of the N1. Observation however could not reveal whether this particular rocket was just a mockup and that the Soviets were indeed many months behind the U.S. in the Moon race. Soviets, as far as they were concerned, were hopeful that they could carry out a test flight of the N1 in the first half of 1968, but for a variety of technical reasons the attempt would not occur for more than a year. The Russian lunar rocket, the "N-1", was first tested in 1969 but such launch-tests failed. Korolyov, the father of the USSR space program further had died in 1966 due to a ill-treatment in a hospital. The Semiorka rocket, which derived from the Soviet missiles and which had launched the Sputnik, was thus to remain the Russian workhorse launcher, under miscellaneous variants of which the Soyuz rochet, until nowadays. The USA, at the opposite, had succeded, with Wernher von Braun, into building the "Saturn V", as the USA had too launched a series of lunar probes -the 'Rangers'- which photographed the whole Moon, and even landed at it, providing still some of the best photographs of the Moon up to date, and paving too the way to safe Apollo landings. A series of cumulative missions eventually led to the Apollo 11 mission landing on the Moon on July, 21st 1969. The event was watched worldwide by millions of people! The USA had won the space race. Russian technology had been outdone. Von Braun, after the success of Apollo 11, proposed to American vice-president a project for the next 100 years, including a manned mission to Mars as early as 1985, but, the enthusiasm past of the first steps on the Moon, his proposal did not interest anyone No doubt a sign that German engineers captured in 1945 had given the best they could. Apollo 11's computer engineers gave birth to the new computer industry as they indeed were dismissed after the success of the mission. As far as the question of the ICBMs is concerned, which had accelerated the U.S. space program, the Corona reconnaissance satellites proved that there was not, in fact, any ballistic missile gap between the USA and the USSR and if any it was against the Soviets. As the USA thought they had 40 missiles and the Soviets say several hundreds, the reality likely was that the USSR only had 4 missiles! Russia coups of the 1950's end were thus just bluff as one has to ask what the sense had been of the overreaction of a part of the US politicians! There was not any Russian superiority in the domain! In 1967, while NASA’s main focus was on landing humans on the Moon before the end of the decade, the U.S. space agency was also interested in studying interplanetary space. It was the time when Ames Research Center (ARC) in Mountain View, California, managed the often overlooked but highly successful Pioneer program of solar orbiters. Between 1965 and 1968, four Pioneer space probes entered solar orbit to make comprehensive measurements of interplanetary magnetic fields and the flow and structure of the solar wind. The spacecraft also acted as the world’s first space-based solar weather network providing data on solar storms that can impact communications and power systems on Earth, and that could potentially affect Apollo astronauts traveling to the Moon and back. Pioneers were placed in similar solar orbits but spaced at varying intervals from each other, just inside or outside of Earth’s orbit. Planned for six-months of operations, all the Pioneers far exceeded their design lives, allowing joint observations still of a large solar flare in August 1972

US President Johnson was less interested in space endeavors that would follow the 1969 Moon landing and the space agency's annual budget peaked in 1965 and began a steady decline since. Management changes occurred as soon as the first lunar landing successfully performed, as NASA transitioned swiftly from the Apollo Moon landing program to new views for the 1970's. As soon as of Aug. 1, 1968, NASA Administrator James E. Webb refused to fund long-lead items for any Saturn V rockets beyond the original 15, essentially shutting down the assembly line. President Nixon, after reaching office by January 1969 appointed a group to report options available to USA once the Apollo program over. Beyond a general vague consensus that the United States human space flight program should continue, no approved projects existed. A space station, a shuttle to reach to it and even a Moon base were NASA's proposals. The group in its conclusions by September of that same year, noted that the United States should pursue a balanced robotic and human space program but emphasized the importance of the latter, with a long-term goal of a human mission to Mars before the end of the 20th century. That grandiose plan was not followed by President Nixon however as the USA were facing conflict in southeast Asia and domestic programs competing for scarce federal dollars. Only Apollo 16 and 17 were eventually allowed, after several options considered and announced as the US space program turned to the Space Shuttle beginning by 1972, the only project surviving budgetary cuts. Since the Apollo program, many scientists doubt that such manned missions would be worth scientifically and they never liked it, much preferring sending robotic missions into orbit and the solar system as they deem manned missions expensive and crew scientifically inadequate for delicate missions. The Apollo science however set the stage for the golden era of planetary exploration as robotic spacecraft since have been the main sources of new data on the Moon and planets. During the 1970's and the early 1980's a flurry of US deep space missions headed to almost every destination in the solar system, bringing a wealth of data which until now only had been at reach through ground-based telescopes

On April 9, 1965, NASA had moved the primary flight control from human space missions from Cape Kennedy Air Force Station in Florida to the new Mission Control Center at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston as operations there began with the four-day Gemini 4 flight in June 1965. During the previous Gemini 3 flight in March, the Houston control center had acted as backup to the Kennedy control center. Significantly larger than the older control room at Kennedy, the new facility featured newer and faster computers, and spacecraft experts in adjacent support rooms assisted flight controllers during missions. The progressively longer missions necessitated that flight controllers operate in three rotating shifts to support the flights around the clock, a practice that continues to this day. The Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas at the Johnson Space Center, was where NASA’s flight control team planned, trained and executed Gemini, Apollo, Apollo/Soyuz, Skylab and Space Shuttle missions until 1992. It comprised the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR), Visitor Viewing Room, Simulation Control Room, and the Summary Display Projection Room ('bat cave'). During the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights, NASA relied on ground stations positioned around the world to provide a communication network. At best this ground-based network could support about 15 percent of a spacecraft's orbit. The TDRS Project was established in 1973 to design a new communication concept for NASA's Space Network with geosynchronous communication satellites and two ground stations. It would provide NASA's most critical low-Earth-orbiting spacecraft continuous communication, including the newly launched space shuttle fleet. The network would support as many as 26 user satellites simultaneously. TDRS was also expected to reduce the escalating operation costs by eliminating dozens of worldwide tracking and communications ground stations

->Women in Space
The first classes of astronauts were men both in the USA and the Soviet Union because the space agencies of then needed people accustomed to advanced technology, high accelerations, quick reaction time, cool headed under pressure, which both countries decided were mostly found among military pilots, which at the time, were exclusively male. After Yuri Gagarin's flight in the Soviet Union, Sergey Korolyov, for cause of propaganda, had the idea of flying a woman in space and he screened 40 from 400 female candidates for interviews and medical and other tests in January 1962. Valentina Tereshkova was one of five women selected on Feb. 16, 1962. The other four, whose names were kept secret until 1987, were: Tatyana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomaryova, Irina Solovyova, and Zhanna Yorkina. Tereshkova was born in 1935 as, although some of the other female candidates were more technically skilled, she appeared to be more 'politically' fit as her father had died during World War II and she best fit the image of a Soviet proletariat, being a factory worker. A experienced parachutist and a member of the local Young Communist League then the Communist Party also helped. In May 1962, a Soviet space delegation visited the United States and left with the mistaken impression that America was selecting female astronauts and that one of them would be flying very soon. Not to be upstaged, the Soviets put a plan in place to fly not one but two women on separate Vostok capsules as early as late 1962, with Ponomaryova and Tereshkova as the leading candidates. Delays ensued however and the plan was changed to fly only one woman with a male cosmonaut in the other capsule, and Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchov himself made the final selection, choosing Tereshkova, with Solovyova as first backup and Ponomaryova as second. On June 14, 1963, Vostok 5 launched with Valeriy Bykovskiy on board. Two days later, Tereshkova launched aboard Vostok 6 and made history by becoming the first woman in space, using the call sign 'Chaika,' or 'Seagull.' Tereshkova's mission was thus part of the second group flight launched by the Soviets as the other craft was launched and both maneuvered in space. She eventually circled the Earth 48 times over three days and made a successful parachute landing on June 19. Tereshkova was feted as a hero in the Soviet Union and made many goodwill tours around the world to celebrate her accomplishment and yet another Soviet space first. Major General Nikolai Kamanin, the official in charge of cosmonaut training, felt that Tereshkova should fly first, noting in his diary that 'she is active in society, is especially pleasing in appearance, makes use of her great authority among everyone who she knows.' Following her flight, Tereshkova was swept into Soviet politics, serving as a member of the Supreme Soviet, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and the Central Committee of the Communist Party and a well-known representative of the Soviet Union abroad, acting as the Soviet representative to the UN Conference for the International Women's Year in 1975 and leading the Soviet delegation to the World Conference on Women in Copenhagen. She was awarded the Joliot-Curie Gold Medal of Peace for her work with the World Peace Council. Nineteen years later, after the U.S. had begn recruited women into the astronaut corps, the Soviet Union trained Svetlana Savitskaya and launched her on a mission to the Salyut 7 space station in the summer of 1982 thus making sure that the first two women in space were Soviet citizens. Tereshkova never flew in space again. Korolyov’s death in 1966 shelved the plan for further female flight(s) and the female cosmonaut group was formally disbanded in October 1969 and it would be 19 years before the Soviets launched another woman into space. The USA took down unto June 18, 1983 only to launch a woman -- Sally Ride -- like a astronaut with the Space Shuttle as a hardy group of American women pilots however, had passed the same medical tests as the Mercury 7 with excellent scores. However, NASA policy at the time required qualification as a military test pilot, a policy originally established by President Eisenhower in December 1958, which stood until the mid-1960s when the first scientist-astronauts were selected. Sally Ride was one of six women, along with Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid, Anna Fischer, Judy Resnik, and Rhea Seddon, selected in 1978 for NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first American selection class to include females as with the advent of the space shuttle, NASA expanded astronaut selection from only pilots to scientists and engineers, and women became eligible for selection. That class which also included the first three African-Americans and the first Asian-American to serve in the astronaut corps. Ride’s launch on Space Shuttle STS-7 mission occurred almost to the day of the 20th anniversary of the launch of the first woman in space, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina V. Tereshkova. Sally Ride had been born in Los Angeles, California, on May 26, 1951 and graduated from Stanford University with a Ph.D. in physics. She turned in a application to NASA corps of astronauts among 8,000 other people as 35 only were chosen. Sally Ride flew a second shuttle flight in 1984 and she later served both on the commission investigating the Challenger accident and the one about the Columbia accident. She retired from NASA in 1987. After joining the University of California-San Diego as a professor of physics and director of the California Space Institute, among others, she died of a pancreatic cancer in June 2012 Nowadays 60 women from nine countries have made 138 space flights as China flew Liu Yang, its first woman 'taikonaut' in 2012

Space Used

The 1970's, with the termination of the Apollo program and the cessation of piloted space exploration may be interpreted both like the beginning of a age of limitations, or participate into the decline through which the history of this 'inbetween decade' is so often interpreted. About 1970, the USSR inaugurated the 'Troika flights,' after the Russian sleighs drawn by three horses, the first time Russian spacecraft flew a crew of 3, which also brought to the record of 7 cosmonauts orbiting at the same time around Earth. Some argue further, that the developement of the European Ariane launch vehicle series, for example, marked a historical profound shift with the U.S.A. global position. By the 1970's NASA's capability to the geosynchronous orbit was of 70 pounds only as the idea began to add strapped solid motors to launching rockets, bringing progressively that to 1,500 to 1,800 pounds. The manned prestige programs of the 1960's did not obviously constituted the main and only parts of space activities. Edgar Cortright, as far as NASA activities are concerned, who had worked at the NACA directed initial formulation of NASA’s meteorological satellite program, including TIROS and Nimbus as since 1963, he supervised NASA’s programs for robotic scientific exploration and utilization of space, including the lunar and planetary probes, the geophysical and astronomical satellites and probes, biosciences, applications satellites, and the development and use of light and medium launch vehicles, during 10 years. He also was instrumental later in the Viking missions. The 1960's and the beginning of the 1970's saw a flurry of deep space missions which were targeting the planets of the solar system. NASA’s exploration of the solar system began as soon as with the launch of the Mariner 2 spacecraft on Aug. 27, 1962. The spacecraft launched aboard an Atlas-Agena rocket and passed within about 21,000 miles (34,000 kilometers) of Venus, sending back valuable new information about interplanetary space and the Venusian atmosphere. The spacecraft's solar wind experiment was also the first to measure the density, velocity, composition and variation over time of the solar wind. The probe stopped transmitting in 1963. Such missions brought to a greater knowledge of our solar system as they kept to be launched until today. Further, satellites dedicated to science, and in an Earth orbit -the most famed of them being the Hubble space telescope- made that astronomers got -and are getting- a deeper knowledge of the Universe. The civilian use of space and the techniques of remote sensing, on the other hand, appeared just along with the beginnings of the space age. Weather observations were the first targets as the fleet of observation satellites quickly expanded after about 1970, along with new observation techniques. The NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) was created in 1974. Space Earth science came out of age by 1980 and became an official part of the NASA's missions during the following decade. First telecommunications use of space was initiated by the Echo I and Echo II, large inflated structures which allowed first voice communication via satellite or the first coast-to-coast telephone call using a satellite. In addition, the Echo programs resulted in advances in atmospheric density, solar pressure, gossamer structures, solar sailing, and transmitting videos via satellites. The Echo 'passive' communication satellite, dubbed a 'satelloon' had its transmissions including a greeting from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, explaining how Echo fit into the U.S. program of peaceful space research accessible to other countries, and a message from then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson imagining a 'not too distant future when one man, one program, can be seen and heard simultaneously in every living room of the world.'Project Relay then, a 'active' satellite that received and retransmitted signals on a different frequency was the next step. From that, the JPL -- and NASA -- stopped supporting communications satellite technologies relatively early in the Space Age because commercial enterprises were better poised to take up this work. In terms of TV through satellite, since the 1960s, NASA partnerships with commercial companies has enabled world-wide coverage of international events as the first satellite capable of relaying television signals from Europe to North America was the Telstar 1, a 171-pound, 34.5-inch sphere loaded with transistors and covered with solar panels. It launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on July 10, 1962, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 17B aboard a Thor/Delta. On a 3,503-mile by 593-mile elliptical orbit, Telstar's relayed the first live television pictures to France – a U.S. flag waving outside the Andover, Maine, receiving station. In addition to television broadcasts, Telstar also relayed telephone calls, data transmissions and picture facsimiles. The international impact of technical success was immediate. A U.S. Information Agency poll for example showed that Telstar was better known in Great Britain than Sputnik had been in 1957. Telstar was also the first privately financed satellite as Bell Laboratories designed and built the craft, which had been paid for by the American Telephone and Telegraph Corp., under a NASA-AT&T agreement. Until now news crews recorded a international event, developed the film while on their trip back to the studios. Telstar led to television broadcasts as events happened on other continents and opened the era of live news coverage worldwide. Telstar's limitation was that it was available for broadcasts for only about 18 minutes at a time as its orbit passed over the Atlantic Ocean. The much larger communications satellites of today are placed in a geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above the Earth. This results in the spacecraft staying over the same point on Earth's surface, allowing for constant television communications between continents. The Telstar receiving stations were in Andover, Maine, Pleumeur-Bodou, France and Goonhilly Downs, Great Britain as they needed huge antennas, compared to nowadays individual paraboles. The knowledge 'of the Earth' was added to goal 1 of Section 102 of the Space Act of 1958, in 1985 and, in 1989, a 9th goal had been added like the 'preservation of the United States preeminent position in aeronautics and space through research and technology development related to associated manufacturing processes'

The idea of a permanent, manned, stay in the low Earth orbit originated in the USSR during the 1960s' Moon race. Parts of hardware that had been already built served for the first Russian space stations. It's remarkable that the USSR had an almost continuous manned presence in the near-Earth space since 1971. The Salyut station program, which was ferried with Soyuz, was succeeded in 1986 by the Mir program. It is possible that these long duration stays merged into a Mars project in the 1980s, but the original use of such space stations was never clearly understood... The Mir space station operated from 1983 to 1998 before being deorbited into the Pacific Ocean

a Space Shuttle landing. picture courtesy NASA

The USA, as far as they were concerned, had embarked in the 1970s in the Shuttle program. The concept of a space shuttle vehicle originates back to the German 'Amerika Bomber,' or 'Silbervogel' which the Bureau of Aeronautics in the Navy pursued as such studies eventually turned into varied programs in which the US military, NACA and NASA taking part. The X-15 rocket was one result. The U.S. Air Force meanwhile had come with the X-20 space plane, or 'Dyna-Soar' a more direct antecessor to Space Shuttle as that project was terminated by 1963. Those times were those were visions by German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun widely circulated -and named the 'von Braun paradigm.' That consisted into sequential steps with putting a human in space, develop a reusable spacecraft, making access to space cheaper and easier, use this vehicle to build a space station, inhabit the space station and employ it as a base from which to launch manned expeditions to the Moon and, later, Mars. That became a road map for the newly-created NASA but the pressure brought unto the USA by the space successes performed by Russia brought to skip some in the frame of the Apollo lunar program. The step of a space plane let place to the quick development of reliable capsules. Capsules, further, were of a technology ingeneers understood better and a much lower-tech approach. Once the Moon race won over, the USA had to define a renewed path in space. That was done early 1969 when President Richard Nixon established a space task group. The group recommended going back to the von Braun paradigm in some fashion: a shuttle, a space station, manned Moon trips and, finally, manned missions to Mars, which Nixon refused as too expansive. NASA thus had to focus upon the sole shuttle aspect. That decision, on a other hand, marked a key shift from space exploration to space utilisation. It was announced by President Nixon self in January 1972 stressing that such a vehicle would allow the USA to space frequently and relatively cheaply, making space now a backyard. A first version of a space shuttle did not came to fruition for cause of budget concerns, with a two-stage programm, first hypersonic stage carrying a shuttle orbiter on its back up to at least 50,000 ft and then landing back as the orbiter would continue its course to the orbit. Hence NASA eventually came with the current shuttle system. Funding questions also later forbade NASA to a second-generation shuttle and forced to use the Space Shuttle during 30 years with a technology of the 1960's and 1970's. Precision manned landings by the X-24B lifting body -a vehicle the lift of which was procured through its flat underbelly only- about 1975, from a altitude of 60,000 feet, at the Edwards AFB, led to the decision by shuttle designers to not include jet engines on the shuttle to aid landing approaches because such tests demonstrated that lift-to-drag vehicle like the coming space shuttle could approach from high altitude or low-Earth orbit and land like a conventional airplane as early manned spacecraft performed ballistic entry into the atmosphere, similar to that of a missile warhead. Such tests with the HL-10, M2-F3, and X-24B lifting bodies validated engineers’ assertions that such vehicles could be precisely controlled during approach and landing. Advantages of the lifting-body or wing design included reduced mission costs (because the expense of an ocean recovery was eliminated or the weight of a orbiter reduced) and greater cross-range maneuvering capability, like the entire US and a major portion of Mexico. Budget cuts ordered by the Nixon administration meant a jettisonable fuel tank or the boosters retrieved and refurbished by each flight. The first shuttle eventually flew in 1981. Meanwhile the USA had used the Apollo program last parts and vehicles to build an experimental space station, the Skylab, 1973-1974. Such a project helped bring the evidence that man could live and work in orbit. This idea of a space station was further advocated in the USA in the mid-80s by Project Freedom (after only nine space shuttle missions, President Ronald Reagan asked NASA to use the shuttle's capabilities for the agency's next giant leap, a orbiting outpost). It eventually just became the international-partnership International Space Station (ISS) through a cooperation between the former USSR and the USA about the Mir program in the 1990's. Jesco von Puttkamer, who began his NASA career in 1962, when he worked on Wernher von Braun's rocket team as an engineer at the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., during the Apollo Program, was instrumental in advancing U.S. and Russian cooperation in human spaceflight. His personal relationships in Russia and the U.S. allowed him to bring both communities together in dialogue and activities. He arranged the translation from Russian to English of the Boris Chertok series 'Rockets and People' that chronicled the history of the Russian space program. He also was instrumental in Russian exhibitions of U.S. accomplishments in space. His diary/book on the first lunar landing by Apollo 11 was also published in Beijing in 1982 in a Chinese translation. It is ill-known that USA and USSR, then Russia, had a long history of biological-research joint missions, since about the early 1970's, about how the space environment is affecting living creatures. Another, well-known use of space has resided, since about 1978, in the GPS systems, providing for accurate position measurements all over the Earth, resulting from a triangulation through three satellites. As such systems were first used by the military, they now have lately come up with civilian versions allowing for a variety of use! The first GPS system was of a US origin, with he first satellite launched in 1978. The US GPS system is now operated from the Shriever AFB, Colorado. The Soviet -and then the Russians- deviced too their own GLONASS GPS system, first elements of which launched by 1982. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the operational capabilities of the GLONASS system degraded due to lack of funding as it is now in the process of being restored to full functionality. GLONASS is operated from a system control centre near Moscow. Europe lately too began to develop a GPS of its own, the Galileo, with a first satellite launched by late 2005 and is still in development

What about the recentest years? Since 1980, the neoliberal logics really applied to space too, with private companies to provide access, or mining projects to aim the Moon and asteroids. The 1970's might have heralded some dissolution of links between space exploration and futurity, space enthusiasm and the spirit of progress, or technological optimism and military prowess, which likely brought humanity back to down-to-earth thinking that the future turned suddenly closer, in the present, on Earth. After that the USSR collapsed and that new space actors emerged, or that Russia moved to a more cooperative work with the USA (like joint missions using the Space Shuttle, or continued with stays in common aboard the International Space Station (ISS)), space now turns to a privatisation, internationally cooperative, and even a warry future. Recent years in space might emphasize that one passed from generous national budgets for space in the 1960's through economic crisis in the 1970's to a subsequent commercialization of space and, eventually space tourism. That third era of the space conquest is now often termed the 'NewSpace.' NASA by 1989 began buying launch services for its missions, rather than owning the rockets outright. Space main market yearly, consists into 25 telecommunication satellites with Europe launching about 60 percent and the SpaceX company, a corporate born from the new choices in space by the Obama administration represents a low-cost concurrent. India and Japan could also be emerging competitors. It looks most likely that commercial space is mostly about commercial use of ressource in space, like ores at Moon or asteroids. A more elaborated view is that commercial space could also aim to a new home for next generation of humans. By about the same time, NASA launch system ceased to require a person to push a button to start the launch as pads turned to a computerized auto-sequencer, such as the space shuttle used. A operator was still needed however to perform a computer mouse click! A other trend is the will of numerous nations to operate manned space flights, and to reach Moon! As a cooperation work about a common craft is en cours between the European Union and Russia (with both partners keeping a such program on their own, separately), China, India, or even Japan, are aiming both to manned space too, and/or to the Moon. The USA are also aiming to Mars as the capture of a asteroid should be a first technological step. Such distant views, on a other hand, are bringing to a will of international cooperation and the use of robotic technologies to help astronauts in their tasks. All this might well herald too a new space race, comparable to the one which occurred in the 1960s between the USA and the USSR. Space at last, might be turning to a warry future. As the military use of space had developed as soon as the 1960s, the idea now has well surfaced that space could be of much use for any battlefield on Earth, and become a battlefield itself, the 'fourth battlefield!' Anti-missiles programs, or satellite-destroying, or jaming devices are now part of programs of any country able to reach space. 'Counterspace operations' is the new name for the ability to either disrupt or protect a country's space capabilities. The question further complicates as even commercial satellites can be used to disrupt or damage satellites, like a huge number of military ones, even when not deviced for such a purpose. Lasers, on the other hand, are used by some countries to track their satellites, as they can be used too like a weaponry to destroy space assets. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty signed by most countries, stipulated that space is to be used for peaceful purposes but what that means was never been defined. Space nations based then upon the 1945 U.N. Charter defining 'peaceful purposes,' including the inherent right of self-defense as space-pioneering as the early space conquest countries, including the Soviet Union and the U.S.A., placed military communications and early-warning system satellites into space, as both also went farther, developing and testing anti-satellite weapons, which, on a other hand, also occurred before the 1967 treaty was adopted. Considering the 1,380 satellites in orbit today, 149 are US military, 75 Russian and 35 Chinese one. Israel has 9, France 8 and the UK and Germany 7 each. That question of militarized space evolved after that into that any conflict would better come in the form of electronic warfare jamming, directed energy attacks to dazzle sensors, or perhaps most plausibly, hacking a terminal on the ground to render it unusable

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