Space Race

Résumé du document

The Space Race was an informal competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that lasted from 1957 to 1975. It involved the parallel efforts by each of those countries to explore space with artificial satellites, to send humans into space, and to land people on the Moon. Space was a crucial arena for this rivalry. Before a watchful world, each side wanted to demonstrate its superiority through impressive feats in rocketry and spaceflight. Secret satellites kept an eye on the adversary.The success of space race is directly linked to the evolvement of long range missiles, and here USSR scored a really important goal on August 21, 1957 with a successful test of the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.
The R-7 was 34 m long, 3 m in diameter and weighed 280 metric tons, it was two-stage, powered by rocket motors using liquid oxygen (lox) and kerosene and was capable of delivering its payload around 8,800 km, with an accuracy of around 5,000 m. A single nuclear warhead was carried with a nominal yield of 3 megatons of TNT (Mt of TNT).On 4 October 1957, the USSR successfully launched Sputnik 1 (In Russian Sputnik means satellite), the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and the Space Race began. Because of its military and economic implications, Sputnik caused fear and stirred political debate in the United States. At the same time, the Sputnik launch was seen in the Soviet Union as an important sign of scientific and engineering capabilities of the nation.
In the Soviet Union the launch of Sputnik and the following program of space exploration were met with great interest from the public. For the country recently recovered from devastating war it was important and encouraging to see the proof of technical prowess in the new era.

Extraits

[...] Chandrayaan craft project A new kind of space race . between commercial space firms The first space tourist (2001), Dennis Tito On the 28 April 2001, the American businessman Dennis Tito was the first "fee-paying" space tourist when he visited the International Space Station (ISS) for seven days. Even with a 20 million dollar ticket price, the Russian Space Agency managed to start this business and to sell space travels until 2009. Since 2001, three other space tourists flew to and from the International Space Station on Soyuz spacecraft: Mark Shuttleworth (South African in 2002), Gregory Olsen (American in 2005) and Anousheh Ansari (American / Iranian in 2006). [...]

[...] They have passed more than 6 times the original planned mileage and survived several hard Martian years. We could say that this is the most successful mission to Mars till this date. III The International Space Station (ISS) Origins and start of the program In the early 1980s, NASA planned Space Station Freedom as a counterpart to the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations. It never left the drawing board, and with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War it was cancelled. [...]

[...] Space was a crucial arena for this rivalry. Before a watchful world, each side wanted to demonstrate its superiority through impressive feats in rocketry and spaceflight. Secret satellites kept an eye on the adversary. I The competition (cold war) The success of space race is directly linked to the evolvement of long range missiles, and here USSR scored a really important goal on August with a successful test of the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. The R-7 was 34 m long m in diameter and weighed 280 metric tons, it was two-stage, powered by rocket motors using liquid oxygen (lox) and kerosene and was capable of delivering its payload around 8,800 km, with an accuracy of around 5,000 m. [...]

[...] Some failed while others were more successful. The Viking orbiters, both launched in 1976, also had a lander attached. Now we could take pictures from the surface and sent them back to the earth. The second lander, Viking was shut down after a battery failure in 1980, after 3 years on Mars. The first lander, Viking lost contact with the earth after a human mistake from the ground control; they erased the antenna positioning data. This happened in 1982, after 6 years on Mars. [...]

[...] At present, the station has a capacity for a crew of three. Prior to German ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter joining the Expedition 13 crew in July 2006, all permanent crewmembers have come from the Russian or United States space programs. The ISS has however been visited by astronauts from twelve countries and was also the destination of the first four space tourists. IV The Future What about the future? As we seen for the ISS or for the recent mars expedition, the world is no longer in a “cold style competition. [...]