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THE HISTORY OF SPACE
How Rockets Work: Projects
The first rockets were made in China. They used gunpowder as fuel, and were used to propel arrows. The diagram below is around years old and is the oldest known depiction of the 'fire arrows'.
In 1926, Robert Goddard (an American engineer/physicist) launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket. Unlike the Chinese rockets, his one used liquid fuel (gasoline) and liquid oxygen. It reached a height of around 12.5 metres. In 1942, Germany launched the first V2 missile. It normally reached about 90km, but could reach space occasionally (space is 100km high). The pictures below show Robert Goddard with his rocket and the V2 on a 'Meillerwagen' which was used to transport it.
During the Cold War, Russia launched the first satellite, called Sputnik, into space, and started the Space Race. People got worried about it because there was no way of knowing what was on the satellite. It could have held weapons, telescopes, or other things. Later, Russia launched the first man into space (Yuri Gagarin, or Юрий Алексеевич Гагарин in Russian). He orbited the Earth once, then landed in the Saratov region in Russia. As a response to the Russians, the US created NASA.
Yuri Gagarin in his capsule before his flight.
The Russians kept beating the Americans though. They had launched the first satellite, first human, done the first spacewalk, and it looked like they would reach the moon first as well. NASA decided that the only way to get ahead of the Russians would be to start their own moon program, which they called Apollo. It would use a huge rocket called the Saturn V to get 2 connected spacecraft and 3 people to the moon. One would stay in orbit (the Command/Service Module or CSM) and the other (the Lunar Module or LM) would go down to the surface with 2 people. To go home, the top half of the LM would separate and head to orbit, where it would connect with the CSM and head home. It would not be reusable at all, and nothing would remain apart from the Command Module. The photos below show the Saturn V (the Command Module or CM is circled) and the CM, which would be the only part to survive.
On the 16th of July, 1969, Apollo 11 launched, with Commander Neil Armstrong, Lunar Module pilot Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin and Command Module pilot Michael Collins. 4 days into the mission, the LM (named Eagle) finally landed on the Moon, while Michael Collins orbited the moon in the CSM (called Columbia). Soon Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the surface and famously said "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." 4 days later, they returned to Earth and were immediately taken to quarantine. People had never been to the Moon before, and there could have been, although it was unlikely, infectious microbes there. 21 days later, they were released and Apollo 11 finally ended.
It wasn't the end of Apollo though! 6 more missions to the Moon came afterwards, however, Apollo 13 didn't land. This was because an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the Moon. The oxygen had been used for lots of different things, like power (Apollo used fuel cells which turned oxygen and hydrogen into water and power). Mission control decided to abort the landing, and the astronauts moved out of the damaged CSM and into the LM. There was one problem though; the CO2 filters wouldn't fit in the LM. The filters separated harmful CO2 out of the air and were very important, so the Apollo 13 astronauts had to build a contraption to help the filters fit. The photos below show the contraption and the damaged CSM.
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When the last mission to the moon ended, NASA began to start using the Saturn V rocket for other things, like Skylab (shown below), a space station made to see if humans could live in space for long periods of time and to study the Sun in more detail.
NASA and Russia also made the first international docking in space. The Apollo-Soyuz mission. The Apollo CSM launched by a smaller version of the Saturn V, called the Saturn IB, and the Soyuz (a Russian spacecraft still in use today) docked in orbit around the Earth on the 17th of July 1975. They performed lots of joint experiments, and the mission ended the Space Race by showing that America and Russia would start working together.
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