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The conquest of space: Goddard and the rocket pioneers, Operation Paperclip and von Braun, the founding of NASA, Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, the Shuttle and its disasters, the space station, and the new commercial space age.
The conquest of space: Goddard and the rocket pioneers, Operation Paperclip and von Braun, the founding of NASA, Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, the Shuttle and its disasters, the space station, and the new commercial space age.
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Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published a paper deriving the equation that relates a rocket's velocity to its exhaust speed and mass of propellant. It showed that spaceflight was possible with liquid-fueled, staged rockets.
Congress created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics to guide and coordinate American aviation research. The NACA later became the core of NASA in 1958.
Robert Goddard published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes" through the Smithsonian, laying out the math of rocket flight. The press mocked his suggestion that a rocket could reach the Moon.
Hermann Oberth published a book arguing that rockets could carry people into space. It inspired a generation of German rocket enthusiasts, including Wernher von Braun.
Robert Goddard flew the world's first liquid-propellant rocket, which rose about 12 meters in a short flight. The design principle became the basis of modern rocketry.
Amateur enthusiasts formed the Verein fuer Raumschiffahrt, or Society for Space Travel, to build and test rockets. Its members included a young Wernher von Braun before the group was absorbed into military work.
A group of Caltech students and researchers, including Frank Malina and Jack Parsons, began rocket experiments in the Arroyo Seco. The work grew into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, later run for NASA.
The German army opened a research center on the Baltic coast to develop long-range rockets under Wernher von Braun. It became the birthplace of the V-2 missile.
A German V-2 test flight became the first human-made object to reach the edge of space. The rocket, designed as a weapon, proved that large liquid-fueled machines could fly to the boundary of space.
The top-secret Operation Paperclip began in 1944, bringing Nazi scientists to America under military contracts while obscuring their pasts.
A top-secret program called Operation Paperclip commenced in 1944 that sought to bring top Nazi scientists to America under secret military contracts while white-washing their past and high-ranking connections with Nazi Socialism.Technocracy Rising
Germany fired the first V-2 ballistic missiles against London and Paris late in World War II. The weapon killed thousands and was built largely by concentration camp labor.
Wernher von Braun and his core rocket team gave themselves up to United States troops in the Alps. They chose the Americans over the advancing Soviet army.
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The United States secretly recruited Wernher von Braun and hundreds of German rocket scientists at the end of World War II. Their knowledge fed the American missile and space programs.
The Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite, a metal sphere that beeped as it circled the Earth. The event shocked the United States and opened the space age.
The Soviet Union sent a dog named Laika into orbit, the first living creature to circle the Earth. The animal did not survive, but the flight showed that living things could ride a rocket into space.
The first American attempt to answer Sputnik ended when the Vanguard rocket rose a few feet and blew up on live television. The failure deepened fears that the country was losing the space race.
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NASA drew its program names from Greco-Roman mythology: Mercury the messenger, Gemini the twins, Apollo the god of the sun and prophecy, and later Artemis (Apollo's twin) for the return to the Moon, plus Orion, Juno, and the Saturn and Atlas and Titan rockets. The oldest gods still name the newest machines.
A team led by von Braun and JPL launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite. Its instruments discovered the Van Allen radiation belts around the Earth.
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Eisenhower signs the National Aeronautics and Space Act, converting the old aeronautics committee NACA into a civilian space agency that opens on October 1, 1958. NASA goes on to run Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the moon landing within eleven years.
NASA unveiled Project Mercury, its first program to put an American in space. The effort selected seven military test pilots as the original astronauts.
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The Soviet probe Luna 2 became the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another world when it struck the Moon. It marked another Soviet lead in the early space race.
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth once aboard Vostok 1, becoming the first person in space. The flight stunned the world and pressured the United States to respond.
Alan Shepard flew a short suborbital hop aboard Freedom 7, becoming the first American in space. The flight came weeks after Gagarin's orbit and gave the country a boost.
President Kennedy told Congress that the nation should commit to landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out. The speech set the goal that shaped the Apollo program.
John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth aboard Friendship 7, circling the planet three times. His flight matched a milestone the Soviets had already reached and made him a national hero.
Speaking at Rice University, President Kennedy made the public case for the Moon program to a national audience. The address became the defining statement of American ambition in space.
Gemini 3 carried two astronauts and began the program that tested the skills needed to reach the Moon. Gemini crews practiced docking, long flights, and working outside the spacecraft.
During Gemini 4, Ed White floated outside his capsule for about twenty minutes in the first American spacewalk. It proved that astronauts could work in the vacuum of space.
A flash fire swept through the Apollo 1 capsule during a ground test, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The disaster forced a major redesign of the spacecraft.
NASA launched the uncrewed Apollo 4 mission on the first flight of the giant Saturn V rocket. The booster, designed by von Braun's team, remained the most powerful rocket to carry people for decades.
After the Apollo 1 fire, Apollo 7 carried a crew into Earth orbit to test the redesigned command module. Its success put the Moon program back on track.
Apollo 8 carried the first humans to leave Earth's orbit and circle the Moon. The crew's live broadcasts and the Earthrise photograph became lasting images of the era.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited above. An estimated 600 million people watched the landing on television.
Apollo 12 made a precise landing near an earlier robotic probe on the Moon. The mission showed that lunar landings could be routine and accurate.
An oxygen tank exploded on the way to the Moon, and the crew used the lunar module as a lifeboat to get home. The safe return became a famous story of improvised engineering under pressure.
Apollo 17 was the final crewed mission to the Moon and the only one to carry a trained geologist. No human has returned to the lunar surface since.
NASA launched Skylab, its first space station, built from leftover Apollo hardware. Three crews lived aboard and studied the Sun, the Earth, and how the body copes with long stays in space.
American and Soviet spacecraft docked in orbit and the crews shook hands, easing Cold War rivalry in space. The mission was the first international human spaceflight.
NASA launched two probes to tour the outer planets, returning close views of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Both later crossed into interstellar space, the most distant human-made objects.
They comprise three facts of life with which even the youngest student must learn to deal and may be introduced by the key words: crowds, praise, and power.Life in Classrooms
students have something in common with the members of two other of our social institutions that have involuntary attendance: prisons and mental hospitals.Life in Classrooms
First, there was almost no relation between measures of students' attitudes toward school and measures of their attention in class. The average correlation coefficient describing this relationship was .10.Life in Classrooms
The Space Shuttle Columbia flew the program's first mission, the first reusable crewed spacecraft to reach orbit and glide back to a runway. It began three decades of shuttle flights.
Sally Ride flew aboard the shuttle Challenger and became the first American woman in space. Her flight marked a shift in who could become an astronaut.
The shuttle Challenger broke apart shortly after launch, killing all seven crew members including teacher Christa McAuliffe. A cold-damaged seal in a booster caused the failure and grounded the fleet for years.
The shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, giving astronomers a clear view above the atmosphere. A flaw in its mirror was later fixed by a spacewalking crew.
Astronauts on shuttle mission STS-61 installed corrective optics that fixed Hubble's blurry vision. The repair turned a troubled telescope into one of science's most productive instruments.
The shuttle Atlantis docked with Russia's Mir station, joining the two former rivals in orbit. The Shuttle-Mir program taught both sides to work together before building the International Space Station.
NASA landed the Pathfinder probe on Mars and released Sojourner, the first rover to drive on another planet. The mission showed that cheap, fast robotic exploration could work.
The Russian-built Zarya module became the first piece of the International Space Station in orbit. Over the next decade the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada assembled the outpost.
Jeff Bezos quietly founded the rocket company Blue Origin to lower the cost of reaching space. It later flew a reusable suborbital rocket and carried paying passengers.
The Expedition 1 crew moved into the International Space Station, beginning a continuous human presence in orbit. People have lived aboard the station without a break ever since.
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Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of cutting launch costs and eventually reaching Mars. The company grew into NASA's main partner for cargo and crew flights.
The shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry, killing all seven astronauts aboard. Falling foam had damaged the wing at launch, and the loss led to the decision to retire the fleet.
Yang Liwei orbited the Earth aboard Shenzhou 5, making China the third country to launch a person into space on its own. The flight announced China as a serious spacefaring nation.
NASA's twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity reached Mars and found strong evidence that water once flowed there. Opportunity kept working for more than fourteen years.
SpaceX became the first private company to put a liquid-fueled rocket into orbit with its small Falcon 1. The success came after three failures had nearly bankrupted the firm.
SpaceX launched its larger Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. Later versions landed and flew again, sharply lowering the cost of reaching orbit.
The shuttle Atlantis landed after the final mission, STS-135, ending thirty years of flights. NASA then relied on Russian rockets to reach the space station until commercial vehicles were ready.
NASA lowered the car-sized Curiosity rover onto Mars using a rocket-powered sky crane. It found that the planet could once have supported microbial life.
After a nine-year journey, NASA's New Horizons probe made the first close flyby of Pluto. It revealed icy mountains and plains on a world once seen only as a dot.
SpaceX flew the Falcon Heavy, then the most powerful operating rocket, and landed two of its boosters side by side. The demonstration flight carried a Tesla car into space.
China's Chang'e 4 made the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon. The mission marked China's rise as a major power in space exploration.
SpaceX flew NASA astronauts to the space station aboard its Crew Dragon capsule. It was the first crewed orbital launch from American soil since the shuttle retired in 2011.
NASA landed the Perseverance rover to search for signs of ancient life and collect rock samples. It carried the small Ingenuity helicopter, which made the first powered flight on another planet.
The James Webb Space Telescope launched as the largest and most powerful space observatory ever built. Its infrared instruments can see the earliest galaxies and study distant planets.
NASA's DART spacecraft crashed into a small asteroid to test whether an impact could change its path. It was the first demonstration of a way to defend the Earth from a dangerous asteroid.
NASA launched the uncrewed Artemis I mission, sending its new Orion capsule around the Moon on the giant Space Launch System rocket. It was the first step in the plan to return astronauts to the lunar surface.
China finished assembling its Tiangong space station with the docking of its final module. The outpost gave China a permanent crewed presence in orbit and sharpened its rivalry with the United States.
SpaceX launched the first full test of Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. The vehicle is central to plans for carrying people to the Moon and Mars.