AMERICA IN SPACE A personal voyage of discovery by Marius Stuart WHERE WE WENT Washington DC Smithsonian Institute, Aerospace Museum The Kennedy Space Centre Cape Canaveral INSPIRATION Somewhere around 1640 Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac wrote two of his best known works A voyage to the Moon; with some account of the Solar World. These stories of imaginary journeys to the Moon and Sun were published posthumously in 1656 and Jules Verne published many fantasy and fiction novels such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1864; From the Earth to the Moon in 1865; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1869 and Around the World in Eighty Days in Jules Verne H.G. Wells (1866 to 1946) is best remembered for his science fiction novels The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and The Invisible Man and is sometimes referred to as the father of science fiction. Gene Rodenberry, creator of the 60s science fiction TV series Star Trek stimulated many childrens imagination and motivated them to take up science/engineering as a career in later life. Gene Rodenberry John F. Kennedy speech on 12 th September 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. John F. Kennedy EARLY PIONEERS Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Robert Goddard Herman Oberth Sergey Korolyov Wernher Von Braun NATIONAL AERONAUTICS & SPACE ADMINISTRATION (NASA) As a response to the launching of Sputnik 1 by the USSR on 4 th October 1957 the US Department of Defence on 7 th February 1958 issues directive 5105 establishing the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). This also lead to the formation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA in the same year. Uri Gagarin on the 12 th April 1961, aboard the Vostok 1, was the first man to be successfully launched into space and to orbit the earth. NASA launched Alan Shepard in a sub-orbital flight on 5 th May 1961 in the Freedom 7 spacecraft on top of a Redstone rocket vehicle. THE FIRST AMERICANS IN SPACE The Mercury 7 Astronauts John Glenn THE GEMINI PROJECT Gemini was an early NASA human spaceflight program. Gemini helped NASA get ready for the Apollo moon landings. Ten crews flew missions on the two-man Gemini spacecraft. The Gemini missions were flown in 1965 and NASA designed the Gemini capsule, which flew on a Titan ll rocket, for this program. On the outside, it looked much like the capsule used for the Mercury missions. It was bigger than the Mercury capsule. It could hold two people instead of one. But each astronaut did not have much room. The Gemini capsule improved on the Mercury spacecraft. Basically, the Mercury spacecraft could change only the way it was facing in its orbit. The Gemini could change what orbit it was in. Gemini APOLLO Following Gemini came the Apollo program in In 1967 on the 27 th January three astronauts in Apollo 1, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were practicing some routine ground based tests when disaster struck, a flash fire within the command module took the lives of all three. The reason for this was due to a random spark from a switch or similar piece of equipment igniting material within a 100% oxygen environment. Ill tell the rest It was not till 1968 before the redesigned spacecraft was considered safe enough for manned missions. There were over 1,300 modifications made to the design following the accident. 7 years after JFK gave his prophetic speech Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the Moon on 20 th July 1969.Neil Armstrong THE END THANK YOU