Benefits of Space Exploration

The United States space program was born, for all practical purposes, in 1957, in an environment of fear and dread. Why that was so could not have been predicted from a technical standpoint because government scientists had long been contemplating the development of rocket technology that could drive a program of space exploration for decades. Dr. Robert Goddard, a physicist, experimented with small rockets from the 1920s until his death in 1945, and he created a liquid-propellant theory of powering rockets to travel beyond Earth atmosphere. In 1926, he launched the first liquid-fueled rocket, although the rocket was small-scale and its flight path terrestrial and not orbital (Watson & Barry, 1997; Crouch, 1999).

During the 1930s, rocketry was also a project at the California Institute of Tec

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lled not chiefly through NASA but chiefly through Cal Tech, were originally specifically military in nature, originally the priority of administrations under both Ike and JFK. Surveillance of enemy territory, together with two civilian-cum-military applications--weather observations and global satellite telecommunications--were the three principal uses to which automated space flight was dedicated. The applied-science features of automated space flight were so well recognized that the first interplanetary space ships "were already under construction as the 1960s opened" (Goldsmith, 1999, p. 56). This was so even though the public perception of space exploration focused on the Mercury and later Apollo programs and on the notion of human-centered space travel. To put it another way, the really significant features of space travel were known by experts to have been centered on automated, unmanned craft. The manned space program--specifically, the Apollo series of flights in earth and moon orbit, as well as several moon landings--was nevertheless perceived to be the real prize. There was also the factor of credibility. Goldsmith's view is that the Apollo program accomplished for American space science what a host of unmanned but eff
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Approximate Word count = 5996
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)

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