A must-have for anyone fascinated by space travel, rocketry, NASA,
SpaceX, and more!
A new era in spaceflight, led by SpaceX and other commercial rocket
companies, is generating the kind of worldwide interest in space travel
that we haven't seen since the space race of the 1960s. Kids are
dreaming of becoming astronauts again. New feats, such as SpaceX's
remarkable ability to land booster rockets, under powered descent, back
on land or sea has galvanized a new generation of rocket enthusiasts.
Yet none of this would be possible without the advances of rocketry over
the past century.
The Chinese were the first to develop black-powder fireworks and rockets
centuries ago, but modern rocketry truly began with Robert Goddard's
launch of a liquid-fueled rocket on a Massachusetts farm in 1926. That
metal contraption--which flew just 41 feet high before arching over and
streaking 184 feet into a cabbage patch--came just 43 years before Neil
Armstrong stepped foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. Armstrong's Apollo
11 mission was made possible by a giant 36-story-tall Saturn V rocket
that used some of the same propulsion principles as Goddard's first
tiny, crude rockets.
The beginning of the "Space Age" is considered to be Russia's launch of
the world's first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. But it was the pioneering
human spaceflights of the 1960s that captured the imagination of the
world and turned astronauts into heroes. Weapons of war--the Redstone,
Atlas, and Titan II missiles--were converted into civilian launch
boosters and led to the success of the Mercury and Gemini programs. All
the while, Saturn rockets were being developed that would ultimately
lead to the moon missions. Kids were so excited about these pioneering
space flights that an entirely new hobby--model rocketry--was created to
serve their interests. Small scale models of NASA's big rockets were
ordered by the millions, generating a $100 million hobby at a time when
there were no video games, no internet, and no cable, just three
broadcast television networks.
Now, the next generation of rockets from SpaceX and other commercial
companies, along with NASA's new launch vehicles and Orion spacecraft,
will lead the United States and the world into a new era of
rocketry--beginning with crewed flights to the moon as early as 2024,
and ultimately to Mars within the first half of this century.
