Harrison Skey
Mrs.Tomasino
Honors English III
28 May 2016
NASA: Shooting for the Stars It is extremely intriguing to look at all that mankind has discovered, and to think about where the world would be today without the so many discoveries that we have today. Throughout the many developments that have taken place in this day in age, space exploration has been one of them. But think about this: What if NASA didn’t exist? What if all of the discoveries made from and about space were nonexistent? It’s safe to say that NASA has played a huge role in what we call society today. NASA remains one of the most beneficial programs not only to the United States but also to the world. NASA was developed and created in response to national security threats
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NASA was introduced and given purpose by the simple pre-amble stating, “[NASA is] an act for research into the problems of flight within and outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and for other purposes,” (Garber and Launius). Another reason for the creation of NASA was so that the US could contribute to the International Geophysical Year by launching and orbiting a satellite, as approved by President Eisenhower (The Editors of Kennedy Space Center). This satellite that Eisenhower approved was called Project Vanguard and used a simple non-military rocket to get into space (which was a conscious decision considering that the Cold War was raging at this point in time). Though this was a great step for NASA, the hype from this launch didn’t last long simply because the Soviets took the next step, and it was a big one. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite (more technologically advanced) of the …show more content…
The turn of the twentieth century soon approached, and after the Soviets were the first ones to orbit the Earth, NASA soon desired to make an effort to put a man on the moon to get ahead in this “space race”. This desire gave birth to project Apollo. Also, president John F. Kennedy committed the United States to having a man on the moon by the turn of the century, so this project was inevitable (Badertscher). Project Apollo was funded by over 25.4 billion dollars between research for the missions and the necessary equipment for the missions that were carried out, this made the series of Apollo missions the biggest non-military endeavor of its time (Garber and Launius). Though these missions were extremely promising and seemed to be designed very well, there were some major flukes in some of the missions. In 1967 on January 27, there was a fire in an Apollo capsule before takeoff that ended in the loss of the three lives of the astronauts on board (Garber and Launius). But this didn’t stall the development and push to continually develop this program; it may have given NASA and the United States more motivation to achieve their goal as a nation. Within two years after the tragedy on one of the first Apollo spacecrafts, NASA had already successfully launched and used two more Apollo crafts to orbit the moon and gather data for the next mission (Garber and