NASA: A Brief History Of Animals In Space

An Act to provide for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth's atmosphere, and for other purposes."- Congress and the President of the United States.

The official start of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, otherwise known as NASA, was October 1, 1958, as stated in “NASA History in Brief” on www.nasa.gov. NASA is located in Cape Canaveral Florida. The United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War and during this period space exploration emerged, and before you know it, the United States and the Soviet Union, which became known as the space race. This is how the history of NASA began, and it is still going. Through this space race, the first monkey, and the first man went to space,

On January 31, 1961, Ham, became the first chimpanzee in space as stated in the article “A Brief History of Animals in Space” on history.nasa.gov. The first well-known project of NASA was Project Mercury in an effort to learn if humans could survive the rigors of spaceflight. On May 5, 1961, Alan B. Shepard Jr. became the first American to fly into space, found in “A Brief History of NASA”. Also, in the same article it says that John H. Glenn Jr. became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. After all these things happening during the space race, on July 1, 1962 the Kennedy Space Center, named after John F. Kennedy, was opened in Cape Canaveral, Florida. During Project Gemini, another project from NASA, on June 3, 1965, Edward H. White, Jr. became the first U.S. astronaut to conduct a spacewalk. There were many more missions, and one of these missions from NASA might be the most widely known mission of all- the mission to go to the

The Shuttle's first mission, on April 12, 1981 demonstrated that it could take off vertically and glide to an unpowered airplane-like landing, found in the article “A Brief History of NASA”. However, on January 28, 1986 a leak in the joints of one of two Solid Rocket Boosters attached to the Challenger orbiter caused the main liquid fuel tank to explode 73 seconds after launch, killing all 7 crew members as said in the same article. The program was grounded for about two years, and when the shuttle successfully returned to NASA flew 87 successful missions. In February 1, 2003, as the Columbia orbiter was returning to Earth on the STS-107 mission, it disintegrated about 15 minutes before it was to have landed, killing seven