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January 8 - January 23, 2020
Saturday, October 5, 1957,
Soviet Union launches the worlds first ever satallite called "sputnik", Russian for satellite or fellow traveler.
Laika
A month after sputnik, the soviets launched another satellite this time with a dog named Laika (Russian word for "barker"). An 11 pound Samoyed mix.
April 12, 1961,
Soviet puts first man into space, Who made a complete orbit around earth. Yuri Garin the 27 year old cosmonaut.
cosmonaut,
"Universe sailor" as the soviets called them besides astronauts.
Alan Shepard
First american astronaut to travel into space (Mercury Mission). Rocket just flew straight up then down, unlike 3 weeks before when the soviet cosmonaut who orbited the earth named Yuri Gagarin.
Ham,
Chimpanzee Who flew suborbital mission in 1961.
Apollo 4
Apollo 1 failed as the astronauts cabin bursted on to fire. Apollo 2 and 3 was canceled due to a reorganization due to the fire. But in Nov 9, 1967 Apollo 4 was Launching, no man onboard but the flight was a sucess.
Apollo 5
Flown on 1968, no man on board and minor mistakes but still considered a success.
April 4, 1968,
Apollo 6 flew this day and it was a massive failure. It began to shake furiously and 2 of the 5 engines failed.
“pogo”—to
When space ship shakes violently up and down.
Wernher von Braun,
Guy from the nazi party,master builder of rockets now working for NASA. Surrendered to americans in 1945 and went to work for the United States Army designing rockets.
The real problem would come if the engine fired incorrectly: too short or too weak, and the spacecraft would fly off into eternal space; too long or too strong, and it would crash into the Moon in less than an hour.
“Apollo 8 has 5,600,000 parts and 1,500,000 systems, subsystems and assemblies,” Lederer noted. “Even if all functioned with 99.9 percent reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.” For that reason, Lederer concluded, Apollo 8’s mission would involve “risks of great magnitude and probably risks that have not been foreseen.”
-Jerry Lederer
Valerie always wore the same dress for appearances on television—yellow, with a close-fitting waist and knee-length skirt. Her mother noticed and asked her about it. Valerie had to confess: It was the only good dress she owned. Her husband was about to become one of the most famous men in the world, yet he still earned military pay, about $16,000 per year (plus another $16,000 from Life magazine), which went only so far with five children to feed.
(Borman’s head was so large that his helmet cost an extra $45,000 to build.)
Apollo 8 began to move.
At 7:51 AM they had liftoff.
lunar surface is coated in a mixture of powdery dust and pulverized rock fragments known as regolith.
The Moon’s gravitational pull on Earth is equally important; without it, Earth would wobble on its axis and lose its moderate climate. Summer temperatures could exceed 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Much of Earth could sink beneath water. Spinning faster without the Moon’s grip, Earth days might last just eight hours, winds would reach hurricane strengths, and life would be difficult, if not impossible.
Anders was reading the first words from Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
Christmas Eve passage that the astronauts read to earth on their broadcast.
At launch, six days and two hours earlier, Apollo 8 weighed 6.2 million pounds. Now just 12,000 of those pounds remained.
Cronkite explained to the nation what the astronauts were enduring. “Seven g’s is seven times their weight on Earth, so these one-hundred-fifty-pound astronauts weigh something like one thousand fifty pounds, would be the effect as they are pressed against their couches.”
NASA made four more manned trips to the Moon after Apollo 13, all of which successfully landed crews on the surface. Collectively, the astronauts on the Apollo missions returned almost 842 pounds of lunar soil and rock, samples that continue to form the bedrock upon which our understanding of the solar system’s origins is based. In all, twelve Americans walked on the Moon between 1969 and 1972. And that was it. Since Apollo 17, humankind has never returned.
