The Greatest Adventure

Description

The Greatest Adventure explores the past, present, and future of the space race.  
The space race was perhaps the greatest technological contest of the twentieth century. It was a thrilling era of innovation, discovery, and exploration, as astronauts and cosmonauts were launched on space missions of increasing length, complexity, and danger. The Greatest Adventure traces the events of this extraordinary period, describing the initial string of Soviet achievements: the first satellite in orbit; the first animal, man, and woman in space; the first spacewalk; as well as the ultimate US victory in the race to land on the moon. The book then takes the reader on a journey through the following decades of space exploration to the present time, detailing the many successes, tragedies, risks, and rewards of space exploration. Colin Burgess is the author or editor of nearly forty books on military and space flight, including Selecting the Mercury Seven: The Search for America’s First Astronauts. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Astronomy, the study of our Moon, the planets, stars and other celestial objects, is widely regarded as our earliest science. Once astronomers and philosophers began to comprehend our planet’s actual position in the universe, those myths of old mostly gave way to later theoreticians musing about ways to somehow fly to our closest celestial neighbor.
 
Since 1915, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics(naca) had been working on problems associated with aircraft flying faster and higher, incrementally extending its research to high-altitude and space flight. In April 1958, Congress took the first steps to set up the new civilian space agency, and President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act three months later, on 29 July. A further three months on, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration(nasa) officially came into being, headed by the agency’s first administrator, T. Keith Glennan. On 1 October, NASA began operations by fully absorbing naca, its 8,000 employees and five research centers, and its $100 million annual budget.
 
In the years to come, America’s space programme would enjoy tremendous advances in technology, with NASA’s astronauts accomplishing goals of increasing complexity, length and difficulty, despite some tragic setbacks. Although he never lived to see the first American astronauts walk on the Moon before the end of the 1960s, the Apollo programme that placed them on the lunar surface will forever exemplify the spirited character and commitment of Kennedy’s presidency. In April 2021, the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the first human space flight by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. When that anniversary rolled around, somewhere in the vicinity of 550 people had been launched into space, slightly less than two-thirds of them Americans, and a number that disproportionately includes fewer than seventy women.
           
To date, there have been eighteen astronaut and cosmonaut fatalities during space flights, including fourteen people lost in the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle tragedies. Several astronauts have also died while training for space missions, including the three Apollo crew members who perished in a ferocious launch pad fire in January 1967. Other fatalities occurred during space flight-related activities, including 24-year-old Valentin Bondarenko, a member of the Soviet Union’s first cosmonaut team, who died in a test-chamber fire fueled by a pure oxygen environment in March 1961. Despite these tragedies, all those participating knew and accepted the hazards involved in flying into space and mourned the loss of their colleagues. They realized that space exploration is a human imperative and that it would continue despite the losses.
 
As we prepare for the next six decades of space travel, which will undoubtedly include fully commercial journeys by numerous national and private participants, whole new generations of space explorers will travel beyond low Earth orbit once again, on journeys to the Moon and Mars and many other exciting possibilities within our solar system.
 
Unlike those people from ancient and even more recent times, who could only gaze at the Moon and contemplate what it would be like to travel to that magical place and other worlds, we have collectively witnessed those fledgling steps out into the universe. Travelling further afield in space is our undeniable destiny and given the spur of human curiosity to seek and explore, such aspirations are both beckoning and achievable.
 

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