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EVERYONE who watched the television coverage of the first landing on the moon in July 1969 has indelible memories of that day. The memories of Ed Fendell are particularly vivid.
Fendell, an integrated communications specialist at Mission Control in Houston, watched with pride as his Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the surface of the moon.
"Finally, we made a shift change," recalls Fendell in the documentary Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo. He went to get something to eat for breakfast and stopped to buy a copy of a newspaper full of news of the landing.
He says, "I sat at the counter … Two guys came in and sat next to me and one of them said to the other," You know, I landed in Normandy on D-Day … I've never been more proud to be an American than yesterday, when we landed on the moon. "
Fendell, clearly moved by the memory, continues: "That then hit me what we had done."
The Apollo program is one of many programs successfully launched by NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, over the decades. Sixty years ago today, on July 29, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act. On October 1 of the same year, NASA began operations.
In the years following the Second World War, a race for space was developed between the Americans and the Soviets. Both sides made steady progress but America was plunged into a crisis on October 4, 1954, when its communist rival launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite the world had seen.
"This had a Pearl Harbor effect on the American public opinion," says the Nasa official story page, "creating the illusion of a technological and motivated gap. increased spending on aerospace, technical and scientific projects, and the chartering of new federal agencies responsible for the management of air and space research and development. "
NASA was operating for some years when, in May 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked his country to pledge to put Americans on the moon by the end of the decade. His statement came shortly after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit around the Earth. Kennedy, reluctant to see the United States further in the race for space, has committed huge new sums to NASA. We sometimes forget, as NASA points out, that JFK entered the White House thinking that space could be a zone of cooperation with the Soviet Union that would ease the tension between the two countries. It was a hope that he never gave up.
It took NASA eight years and three programs – Mercury and Gemini had preceded Apollo – before they could realize Kennedy's dream of putting an American on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first men to leave behind. footprints on the moon. surface, July 20, 1969.
Pete Conrad and Alan Bean of Apollo 12 followed suit in November (commander of the command module, Richard Gordon, died last year), but a third lunar landing in 1970 nearly came to an end to disaster. spatialship. The crew was brought back to earth safely.
NASA's many other programs range from robotic missions to Venus, Mars and the outer planets, Skylab's orbital workshop, terrestrial remote sensing satellites, aeronautical research and of course the Space Shuttle, the first reusable spaceship.
This shuttle program suffers two great misfortunes: in 1986, the main liquid fuel tank of the Challenger orbiter exploded 73 seconds after launch, killing the seven crew members, and in 2003, the The orbiter Columbia disintegrated 15 minutes before landing. killing his crew of seven.
This is indeed from the Space Shuttle Discovery that NASA launched the Hubble Telescope in April 1990. She more than respected the organization's description as being "the advanced most important astronomical point since the telescope of Galilee ". the mysteries of the cosmos and make over 1.3 million observations as it surrounds the Earth at around 17,000 mph.
The director of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, strives to remind the public what the organization has achieved in addition to space exploration.
In a recent speech marking the sixtieth anniversary, Bridenstine said that NASA had transformed people's lives by paving the way for navigation, communication, food and energy production, weather forecasting and the understanding of the Earth. "All these capabilities, which we take for granted as Americans, are accessible to us because of the track that NASA has traced," he said.
The musician will.i.am added, "Much of the technology that we have today … would not have been possible if it was not for many of Many of the systems we use today in our cell phones, if it was not what NASA was doing at the time, we would not have that we have today.
Tycoons like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson have invested huge sums in the space adventure. Musk wants to reach Mars by 2020, Bezos thinks that the Moon can be colonized in a century, and Branson plans to bring well – heeled tourists into space next year.
NASA, however, has its own ambitions, claiming that its future will continue to involve "human exploration, technology, and science." He will return to the moon to try to learn "what it will take to support human exploration to Mars and beyond."
Other priorities include the development of a "dynamic low-orbit economy" by building on the success of the International Space Station and by inventing new technologies to boost air transport at home. and meet the challenges of advanced space exploration.
"Our scientists," he adds, "will work to improve the understanding of our planet and our place in the universe. We will continue to try to answer the question "Are we alone?
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