Embedded Files
What genius said “Oh look, I know how to get to space! I’ll just make a giant pipe bomb and sit on top of it!”? There were actually many people that led to the development of the modern rocket and accomplishments stemming from that. The earliest versions of rockets were fireworks, built to fly off into the sky before exploding into a million shiny bits for no other reason than to do so. This basic technology was later developed into the Congreve rocket by a guy named Sir William Congreve. Well I say that, but war rockets like this were actually also being used by other countries beforehand. We just know this one best as he was the one who popularised it with the English. This is also actually the rocket lending itself to the line “the rockets red glare” in The Star Spangled Banner.
Congreve Rocket before firing.This is likely a modern reproduction. Source: British Science Museum (According to another website)
About, oh I don’t know, 80 or 90 years later, a dude named Robert Goddard did his own studies, but not on normal gunpowder. No, he tried to use liquids for fuel. Which worked very well, garnering almost no press attention and a statement from the New York times basically saying that he’s a joke and that a rocket wouldn’t work in a vacuum. Pfft, what an idiot. (I know right? hahaha)
There were also some people named Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who figured out some of the more complicated bits, like parallel development of liquid fuel technology, and the idea of staging as well as the rocket equation. In combination, these 3 people are known as the founding fathers of modern rocketry (along with a french guy).Then came the 1930s and 40s. A german by the name of Wernher Von Braun became fascinated with rocketry, going to the point of even tying mice to bicycle wheels to see what happened at high g forces. The answer? New coats of red paint on the wall and an eviction, if I remember well. Then because of some guy who had the idea of making Germany a power for “eintausend Jahre” with a swanky new logo and complete disregard for human rights, Von Braun become part of an army effort to make a rocket! To Earth. Carrying a bomb. In Von Braun’s view, this was only a step to better things and he wasn’t really trying to kill people. This was memorialized in a song from Tom Lehrer titled Wernher Von Braun (which is actually kinda neat). The program was successful though in producing a rocket that was able to sort of bomb London like a giant artillery gun, but was also just a good rocket, being the first manmade object to go into what is officially considered space.
An A-4 rocket, better known as the Vergeltungswaffe-2 or V-2 developed at Peenemunde, a coastal area housing the Nazi Army’s proving grounds. Must have been quite fun for whatever local left there. Interestingly, versions building on the A-4 were planned. As history shows though, they didn’t really happen, but they did look cool, IMO.
Development of bigger and better rockets continued after the war, mainly cause the two superpowers of the world discovered or figured out that this V-2 experiment was actually a pretty swell idea and wanted to use it themselves. Both sides captured or took scientists and engineers from the Germans to start their own missile developments. This led to bigger rockets with bombs strapped to the top and then eventually, strapping satellites on top. Sending a satellite into orbit is a symbolic gesture as it is a demonstration of the capabilities of their respective missiles. See, if a rocket can put a small payload into orbit, it can almost definitely put a relatively larger one (like a nuclear bomb for instance) into someones backyard halfway around the world. Which was terrifying, considering bombs especially of the nuclear variety were the main payload. So when Sputnik launched into orbit on the R-7 (an orbit funnily enough a bit higher than the originally planned one). It was also probably celebrated with borscht in the native country, or some other celebratory food or drink.
Launch of the R-7 apparently carrying the Sputnik 1 satellite. It was a really stupid simple satellite, just really more of a radio beacon than anything with a shiny housing. However, it did work and fairly well too. The rocket also obviously worked and derivatives are still in use today. It's a good design - why change it?
Sputnik! The tiny little silvery ball. As you can see, it’s really not a complicated design. At all. Actually this is not Sputnik 1, the shown satellite is more likely than not a model as there’s not really a good way to recover it and it has already probably burned up in the atmosphere.
This scared the sh** out of Americans as it meant certain, deathly implications. Oh, and that it seemed like the Soviets were more technologically advanced than the Americans. This was actually not really the case as the soviets had certain issues with re-entry, or the bit when a screaming projectile burns through the atmosphere at a couple hundred miles per hour. The specific issue was that the re-entry process would more often than not lead to a toasted and completely useless warhead (and of course you can’t really cause the nuclear apocalypse without a working nuclear weapon)! On a different note, the Americans also were developing and launching a satellite on a Navy Vanguard launcher which went horribly wrong and was funny as that particular satellite was highly publicized, leading to even further humiliation.
A humiliation in progress - The Vanguard rocket that was supposed to go up into the air and launch America’s first satellite isn't quite doing that, its sort of falling towards the ground.. As you can obviously tell, the large clouds of fire around the bottom of the rocket signal bad things are happening. Also note the brownish nose cone at the top thats leaning over and also the entire rocket, relative to the red and white launch tower. That ain't right.
After that humiliation (called jokingly by some news papers as ‘Kaputnik’), the Army Missile group where Von Braun was working was allowed to launch a satellite. They could have actually launched it earlier, save for politics preventing them (something about wanting to let the homegrown rocket engineers have a go first or something along those lines). The launch was successful putting up the Explorer satellite and also led to the discovery of the Van Allen belts from its scientific payload. This was probably celebrated with beer. Even before that happened though (Early 1958), the soviets sent up another satellite. This one was special cause it had a dog. It was a stray but it was still a good dog named Laika. She didn’t come back though because of that reentry issue mentioned earlier and also the fact that she was dead in orbit likely from some thermal issues. She wasn’t planned to come back anyways interestingly enough to disguise the shortcoming in Soviet missile technology. Some other satellites were sent up or exploded. In the case of the US it was mostly exploded. In 1960, the Soviets managed to send 2 dogs to space and actually recover them! No planned killings or accidental ones! Which may have ticked off the Americans more. The launch was also a test of the Vostok crew capsule which would later launch Yuri Gagarin into orbit on April 12th of 1961. After doing the usual preflight preparations like putting on the space suit, saying some brave words, and pissing on the tire of the van (this is an actual thing apparently, kept by tradition surprisingly), he was chucked into orbit on a version of the R-7 modified to carry larger payload (read people), also named Vostok, apparently. After he went into orbit, he came back down again not as a dead flaming squishy meatbag in a tin can. Here, one of the problems with the early Vostok spacecraft was shown. Essentially, the parachute system was kinda bad. So the cosmonauts had to bailout to actually land relatively nicely. Which is definitely an interesting system to say the least and one that could go horribly wrong if they weren’t well trained or were unlucky. Luckily this was a space program and space programs train people for that sort of thing. (Sidenote - he didn’t actually live to a good long happy life, instead being killed in some form of jet accident)
That one Russian dude who went into space first and became famous for it. Do I really need to say his name again?
This manned flight really ticked off the Americans. Prior to this, they had been sending up test payloads for eventual manned flight. A chimpanzee named Ham was one and the first living thing sent up by the Americans into space. On his particular launch (Mercury-Redstone 2), several things actually went completely not according to plan. For one, there was a 4 hour delay before launch cause come component was still too warm. After that, the launch went well. Spectacularly well. In the sense that several things failed. For one, the flight guidance was off by about one degree. Adding to this, the liquid oxygen supply (LOX) went away to quickly which meant that the abort system received an unscheduled test. Both of these led to the capsule being flung about 300 meters higher than expected. Which in itself is not a big problem, but this caused the landing site to be moved about 130 miles away from the planned area. Also, the internal pressure of the capsule began to leak at some point. This wasn’t a problem though since Ham had his own spacesuit. After landing then, it took a decent while to actually recover him. Luckily they came as soon as they did cause the heatshield (the thing protecting the soft squishy internals of the capsule from the harsh blistering reentry heat) had punctured the capsule making it leak. The test was useful though as it did show people (or at least chimps) were able to do stuff in space and weightlessness. So that’s nice. Later, Alan Shepard was grudgingly delayed and sent up on another suborbital hop up past the Karman line (which is where the atmosphere is pretty much nonexistent). The Redstone rocket being used as a booster until this time was really not powerful enough. So what do you do when an ex-missile isn’t actually big enough? Use a different bigger one! The Atlas missile was then adapted (or borrowed) to carry the Mercury capsule into orbit. John Glenn then rode this flaming pipe bomb into orbit successfully completing three orbits before coming back down again into the great puddle between America and Not-America.
There’s actually a couple other interesting stories about the development of the Mercury capsules. In one test, they were using pigs as human analogs and, just as an astronaut would, strapped the pig upside down. A person who had worked around farms then during some testing was being done mentioned that putting a pig upside down would in fact kill it. So they changed their testing methods because of that. Another interesting story is that the heat shield for one capsule was in fact 1 inch to big in diameter. Nowadays this would have meant lots of red tape, 3 and a half thousand subcommittees and 3500 officials inspecting how that went wrong for two months and then a 5 month process to get a new one. But this was 1961. So that meant instead of all that, the technicians took some string and a belt sander and very carefully sanded it down to flush and the correct dimensions. That would never happen today. At all (unless you’re SpaceX, find a crack in your second stage engine nozzle, and just cut it off because you have enough extra room for error and having it possibly fail is worse than minor inefficiencies). Another story of note is that on the second manned Mercury Flight, the hatch designed to keep the air in and water or space out from the capsule suffered a malfunction causing it to blow prematurely, almost drowning Gus Grissom. Luckily though, he was able to survive this time around.
Early forays into spaceflight continued for a couple years after that, mainly figuring out further how to keep people alive and stuff in space and whether they could function normally as that was an unknown at the time. The Soviets, perhaps just to claim a world first or because they wanted gender equality (probably the first one actually thinking about both gender politics and the current state of the world, though I can’t really judge), sent up Valentina Tereshkova in another Vostok flight in 1963, which was also apparently the last of the Vostok Flights. Interestingly enough, the Americans didn’t get around to matching this until the 1970s with Sally Ride, but a private group tested women in a similar if not the same manner as the male astronauts in which they scored very well. This led to one of them, Jerrie Cobb, to fly to Washington and shout at some politicians (JFK, a senate committee, the like) for sex discrimination or something along those lines. Those attempts were unsuccessful, so female American spaceflight would have to wait.
Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb, an aviator and one of the women pushing or advocating for female space flight. She was unsuccessful in this endeavour however (as history certainly says).
After each of their own one manned programs, both the Soviets and Americans graduated to chucking up two people (or more) at a time. Double the risk, lots more explosive stuff on the bottom! In the case of the Soviets, this was done in the Voskhod Program and with the Gemini Program for the Americans. Both of these programs were done for further testing of principles needed for later flights, namely spacewalking and longer duration space flights as well as orbital rendezvous in the case of the Gemini Program.
With Voskhod, the first manned flight with 3 people on it was successfully completed. Voskhod 2 is the more interesting one though since that was the one where only 2 people were carried up, but had an inflatable airlock to facilitate space walking, which did happen with Alexei Leonov “stepping” outside for 12 minutes to claim another world first. However, this too had issues to say the least. For one, Leonov carried a suicide pill, showing how much trust the engineers/bureaucrats had in the design of the airlock and to prevent suffering in case he did get stuck outside. Also, the suit was quite very stiff, forcing him to exert a large amount of energy and thus, producing tons of sweat which, in the wrong conditions, could have killed him and also a large amount of heat, concerning the moms back at mission control. Additionally, he violated protocol (didn’t listen to the moms back in mission control) and entered incorrectly, having to deflate his suit to actually get back in.. Which also concerned the moms back at mission control. Overall though, no one died so that’s a success. This was the end of the Voskhod program, with development moving towards the Soyuz spacecraft which would have been used in the Soviet moonshot. Would have. But more on that later!
The Gemini program was a stopgap measure between the more ambitious Apollo program and the Mercury program, designed to test long term duration, rendezvous and docking, spacewalking, as well as refine reentry and landing. The capsule, now being heavier, was launched on an even bigger pipe bomb also derived from a ballistic missile, known as the Titan II. Who knew that rockets are so useful as missiles? Oh wait, everyone….. Adding to that minor change, some brilliant engineers decided that a launch escape system was unnecessary since the explosion caused by an out of control Titan II was thought to be smaller than the cryogenic ones from the Mercury program. The solution to the abort system? Ejector seats. Like on a fighter jet but more horizontal and more robust. Because there weren’t any parachutes or anything, the launch pad technicians before the launches tilled the dirt to hopefully make the landings softer. That seems kinda depressing now, knowing that the lives of astronauts were put in mildly overturned dirt. Anyways, luckily the abort system wasn’t used or needed, otherwise that might have been kinda painful or deadly to astronauts.
The Gemini program did work well though technically, proving many of the the theories behind orbital mechanics and theoretically laying groundwork for the more complex parts of the Apollo mission profile, namely rendezvous. This is basically when two thing moving very quickly in orbit try to meet up. It is quite difficult between timing the launch right, getting the orbits to intersect, and actually meeting at the right time without slamming into each other. Slamming into each other would result in bits of astronaut and spacecraft all over the place. Each Gemini mission, like the Mercury program, was a stepwise/progressive act towards a final goal. Instead of saying “screw it, we totally have the theory nailed” each flight tested a system or set of principles that would be carried on to the next flight. Most of the time. The first few flights were about getting an American to step into space outside the tin can spacecraft and also test long duration flight times. Basically the question was could a 2 week space vacation be done. The answer was apparently yes. How the astronauts on that particular mission survived being stuck in the mostly seated position for 2 weeks is beyond me. Like, really, try putting yourself in a cardboard box with a chair just big enough for you. And wear a heavy sweater restricting motion, since they had those space suits on. Oh, and don’t go outside cause it would kill you, but feel free to cut open a small window to see outside. Just a small one though, can’t be too luxurious. Then just sit there for 2 weeks. Later missions demonstrated rendezvous capabilities and docking. Gemini 6 and 7 rendezvoused, basically staying within sight of each other for a couple hours with little relative velocity. Interestingly, Gemini 6 was supposed to do this “stay inside the range” with a different, unmanned vehicle, but that launch was scrubbed. So Gemini 7 was used, being paradoxically launched first. Gemini 8 did the first docking in space with another unmanned target vehicle. During this though, a thruster became stuck open, causing high spin rates and general lack of controllability. This caused a premature termination of the mission. No one died though, so that’s good! Gemini 9, 10, and 11 all continued practices with rendezvous and docking, even setting a spacewalk record of 5 and a half hours. Why spacewalks were practiced was weird because in a normal situation, an Apollo mission (which the Gemini program was helping develop) would not need. It was more for something went horribly wrong with docking leading to an inability to use the tunnel to transfer crew between the two seperate craft around the moon. Oh, and of course political posterity. This brought an end to the Gemini program sorta paving the way for the Apollo program.
Back to the Soviets though! The end of Gemini was 1966, which is incidentally when the lead designer and major advocate for the Soviet space program Sergei Korolev became quite very dead from some operation with his colon. He was buried and stuff before moving on. A new person, Vasily Mishin was set in charge continuing the work from his predecessor, mainly dealing with sticking a man on the moon. The Soyuz 1, carrying a grand total of 1 (one - un - ein) person was launched. The launch itself was successful , carrying Vladimir Komarov into space well, and having him orbit. One of the other goals, a rendezvous with Soyuz 2 was not performed because Soyuz 2 couldn’t be launched because of some stormy weather (and ideally, when you are riding a controlled explosion, good weather is preferred). The capsule then deorbited and landed. However, it probably made a nice solid thud in the ground while killing probably quite quickly its inhabitant as the parachutes failed to deploy. Whoop de doo, the Soviets now claimed the first spaceflight fatality while on a mission (clapping noises?). Following this and other failures, Mishin started to drink a lot. This is unrelated to the rest of it as far as I can see, but it was an interesting factoid from Wikipedia, the totally reliable information source of the internet. Development of the N-1, a giant 300-something foot 5 stage behemoth of a rocket continued. Due to design problems, such as 36 engines on the bottom needing to be simultaneously controlled (which is hard), other shortcomings, and rushed development (development started in 1965. For comparison, the Saturn V started in 1962), all of its 4 test flights ended in spectacular failures accompanied often by fires or explosions. This basically ended the whole Soviet Moon program, not to mention the Americans by now having basically put a man on the moon. Later Soyuz missions proved rendezvous techniques and other things from the gemini program as well as the lander that would have been used had the program gone forward successfully. The Soviets were quite ambitious though, having even drawn up plans for a lunar base. This too though died with the N-1 and rest of the moon program.
Three general mission plans (at least in the US, not sure what happened in the USSR) were developed or considered to actually land a person on the moon.The first was Direct ascent, another was Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) and the last was Lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR). Direct ascent basically meant that the entire rocket stack travelled to the moon and back in one piece. Nothing would be lost before being recovered and no docking would have been needed. What you would need though is a heckin big lander, enough to carry all the fuel and provisions supplies, and so on for the astronauts and return vehicle after the landing was done and the even heckin bigger rocket to carry that lander into orbit. Like, quite much larger than the Saturn V. So that was infeasible, but still considered. Earth orbit rendezvous was what it sounded like - rendezvousing in Earth orbit. Many launches would stitch together a larger direct ascent vehicle and transfer stage to be sent off to the moon. This may have required many launches though but was still a possibility in the early 60’s. LOR was the sort of forgotten child of NASA only being seriously considered by a small minority. The idea was that instead of 1 tin can being sent up, it was two with one being very specifically dedicated to landing on the moon and the other being very specifically dedicated to not landing on the moon, but just going there and back. The two would separate in lunar orbit with the lander landing before going back up and meeting up again in orbit before the lander was ditched and the astronauts going back home. Despite a lack of enthusiasm about it, people or persons aggressively asking for LOR to be considered and a realization that the rocket that would be needed to actually lift the entire direct ascent vehicle would be gargantuan, favor shifted to an LOR plan. It was also theorized that the separate lander could serve as a lifeboat, but it was dropped as the main engine for the transfer craft could never conceivably break. That was so so wrong a number of Apollo missions later. But it was convenient that it did! LOR was selected as both the mission plans for the Soviet and American programs. Again though, differences in the details of each country were there. With the Soviets for instance a spacewalk was needed to transfer to the lander and back. Also, the plan only to send down one person in the lander and 2 people on the entirety of the trip. This is in contrast to the Americans where 3 people performed the entire mission and 2 people landed. There was also no plan for a spacewalk, with a pressurized tunnel being used instead. No risk of deadly spacewalking death in the cold heartless mostly vacuum of space (like an ex! But nicer!). One could have been done though had they really needed to in an emergency situation if the docking tunnel was unable to maintain an airtight seal (airtight cause you know… its space.)
A pretty nice picture of John C. Houbolt explaining LOR. He was one of the major if not the major advocate for this particular mission plan.
Apollo then happened after Gemini. I would like to elaborate, but there are many good books out there that would do it better than I could. Oh what the hell I’ll talk about it! The Apollo program was the final part of the whole moon mission and is actually the main goal as mentioned earlier (probably… haven’t touched this for a month. As you can see, sometimes this thing breaks the fourth wall. I’m ok with that. Are you though?)
The entire program took literal years to complete. As the Gemini program was just starting, the Apollo architecture (all the boosters, capsules, escape systems, and so on) was being developed. Having decided though that the plan was to use a Lunar Orbit Rendezvous and not some form of direct ascent, this meant development of the Command Module, Lander, and rocket, as well as all the guidance systems, navigation, computer programs, and so on. Big task.
The rocket, the Saturn V, is the largest rocket built to date. In other words, it’s the biggest pipe bomb built by germans. Stepping back earlier in history to the late 1950’s, some stuff has to be explained about the history of the of the Saturn family. The original Saturn I was developed as a heavy lift vehicle for US satellites. During this time interestingly though, there was something of a war between Army departments on who should build the space rockets. It had something to do with funding and politics, like most things. In any case, it restricted the development of rockets and missiles from the Army to devices which could only blow stuff up less than 200 miles away. However, as a heavy lift contract came out from the Department of shooty things, they figured as long as the rockets developed by the army group were purely launch vehicles, it should circumvent the restriction. Development proceeded to make a sort of quick and dirty lifter fitting the criteria of the contract. This was done by basically going “oh hey you see those missile tanks over there? Let’s strap a couple of them together and put some rockets underneath”. That combined with some upper stages from different programs, namely the Titan upper stage and the newly developed Centaur, would have formed the launch system. Through various bureaucratic and engineering changes they somehow ended up with the Saturn V. Something like that, I’m not completely sure.
As a complete and utterly pointless side note or interesting fact, the testing method for rockets changed also with the Apollo program. Earlier before, each rocket design to be launched had each part extensively tested and then each stage extensively checked for flaws before the entire rocket flew. So for example, a first stage would be tested, then a first and second stage, then the full stack without people, and then a full stack with people. If there were also major design changes to the rocket, it would also be tested in an isolated system, by itself beforehand. Within the 1960s though, they moved to an “all-up” testing mentality where the entire rocket was flown as a test mission without any prior individualized flight testing of each stage. Of course, this was seen as pants-crappingly scary to the early wizened men of rocketry who were very cautious in making changes to a design. In retrospect though they eventually considered all-up testing to be necessary to have completed the entire point of the program by the 1970 deadline set out by that dead dude a couple years earlier.
Actually moving to what happened for it after the standard development testing and what not, the most interesting place to start is with Apollo 1, the first manned mission of the Apollo Program. Or what would have been had it not been for a fairly catastrophic failure. During a normal ground test with the crew - consisting of Gus Grissom, Robert Chaffee, and Ed White - checking systems and so on, a fire suddenly erupted. Now, oxygen is great for for making the other bits of the rocket go as it helps release a lot of energy. It's also great at propagating fires, especially a 100% oxygen atmosphere.. Which is fine if its not in the same tin can as 3 astronauts and a small fire. All of them died as the fire quickly consumed the cabin. Ground crews tried to help but could not open it in time. This was, while a fairly small body count, a grave loss and blow to the entire program as this was the first loss of human life in the history of NASA. The program underwent review to determine what happened and also led to a redesign of the capsule to fix design flaws, such as flammable electrical crap surrounding the cockpit, a reduction of the pesky oxygen helping feed the flames, and a door that didn’t actively try to trap the astronauts inside during an emergency. Redesigns to the capsule were done to while development of the Saturn V and Lunar Module (LM) continued.
Moving away from the early days, the interesting bits come after all the unmanned testing and actual just manned test of the Apollo spacecraft on Apollo 7, which was a manned shakedown of the spacecraft as well as an experiment in long duration missions, staying up in space for 11 days. This was fairly successful as nobody died and the spacecraft worked pretty well (apart from a slightly misdeployed panel which eventually led to all future panels being blown off into space to prevent mission ending failures). However, one of the crew members decided to be a smart-ass towards the ground crew (the people stuck on earth making sure that the actual people flying don’t die as well as schedule a good amount of what they should and should not do), and start talking back. This was provoked by a cold as well as other gripes or irritations in the mission, such as debates on whether to reenter with or without a helmet or a kinda bad waste collection system or food choices that didn't particularly suit the astronauts. The whole idea behind leaving the helmets off is to allow the astronauts to equalize so that their hearing implements don't suddenly rupture and cause them enormous amounts of pain.
Apollo 8 logically followed Apollo 7 (I know, who knew NASA could count! Especially considering the apparent absence of Apollo 2 and 3!). Although it was initially slated to test out the LM, the new fancy bit of tech to actually get astronauts from space to the moon into space again, it was not actually flight ready or something for Apollo 8. Naturally then what you do is chuck it into the deep scary unknown - a mission beyond low earth orbit. LM testing was pushed back to Apollo 9. Considering that this was the first time beyond the relative safety of earth, where rescue can be done with relative ease (just need to deorbit) this must have been quite a leap of faith to just toss some men in a tin without an easy or convenient “oh-crap-something-went-wrong plan”. It also moved up the actual date for launch a couple months which meant that the crew had to get prepared earlier, increasing the strain. The mission went off pretty well though, making it to the moon. Sorta. It made lunar orbit, so it was able to stay in a stable orbit around the moon for several days. During which also Christmas passed! For that, the astronauts did a reading from the book of Genesis which was broadcast on TV. One of the crewmen also captured this iconic image, included here.
The iconic “Earthrise” image taken by Bill Anders on the Apollo 8 mission.
Of note is that from the Soviet side of things, although the moon program was making its final dying wheezing breaths, they did keep up appearances for a couple years. Prior to Apollo 8 (launched in December 1968), the Soviets sent up the Zond 5, part of their unmanned missions. Zond 5 was a soyuz-lite, stripped down to actually make it to the moon by losing the orbital module normally carried. It carried several living things aboard it including turtles. Cause of course that’s what you logically send up as a living analogue or something. Zond-5 was also actually part of the pressure helping shift the Apollo 8 launch date forward.
A turtle of the same species apparently successfully sent around the moon. I mean, sure if you want you could do that but it’s a bit of a weird choice from a publicity point of view. Then again, it's the Russians, the same people who sent up geckos in an experiment to see how they fare at sex in space fairly recently (I’M NOT EVEN JOKING).So turtles around the moon isn’t the weirdest thing ever I guess.
Going more on a completely random unmanned tangent (sorry Apollo program, I think we should mention this), Venera probes from the Russians were sent to Venus. Actually in 1969 (where we are approximately now), the Venera 5 and 6 probes were sent. These studied the Venusian atmosphere. General results - Venus is a hellhole and is not suited for human consumption. On the American side of things, Mariner probes to Mars (6 and 7) on flyby’s to take some pretty pictures.
Mars as photographed by Mariner 7. Kinda pretty. But nothing like today.
Going a bit back, 1969 was an exciting time for the Apollo program (spoilers - it worked [you have an issue with that? Well then.]) March saw Apollo 9 launch which, as mentioned earlier tested how the LM performed in general in space. The consensus was that the engineers did their work well. They also performed the second docking between two manned spacecraft, as the Soviets had beaten them by two months. On the plus side though, during the transfer, the American astronauts didn’t have to go on a spacewalk which is nice. Not that they couldn’t though.
Some dude (David R. Scott, the command module pilot) opens a hatch door. Note the bright orange helmet. Its bright orange. Also, isn’t everything shiny? So pwetty….. But things worked! Which was the important part. How was this image captured? Simple, with a camera on another person (Russell L. Schweickart, the Lunar Module pilot)
Apollo 10 was also a thing that happened. This was a combination of Apollo 9 and Apollo 8 in the sense that the the thing went to the moon but also tested out the LM. It was essentially a dry run for the entire lunar landing. The entire mission went off pretty much without a hitch, going down to an altitude of 15600 meters above the lunar surface. There were a couple things of note beyond “it was a dress rehearsal”. One was that it was the fir(something) The other is that it went so flawlessly that they could have theoretically landed apart from the fact that
Then Apollo 11 happened. Some people went to the moon or something. Look it up, don’t have much to say about it. Oh wait I do. psyche i don’t. Go google it. Other people can do a much better job explaining it. Gist is though some guys landed on the moon or something. It’s probably not that important.
Ignore the unrelated image here from some random TV show on an unrelated subject. Still is applicable tho. Google is your friend (what you thought this would be informative?)
Apollo 12 was quite similar to Apollo 11. This one also got hit by a lightning strike which caused a bit of a mild panic as it screwed something up. Changing some dial though fixed it. So thats nice.
Apollo 13 is probably what you can call a successful disaster. After one of the quite critical LOX tanks exploded cause of… something to do with wires heating and tank stirring, they basically lived as castaways in the LM until they could go home. Apollo 14 existed. Apollo 15 brought along a car. Or a buggy. Really more a moon specialized electric car. Apollo 16 also existed. And Apollo 17, which brought along a real-live geologist instead of a test pilot disguised as one.
Then in the early 1970s after the Apollo missions which were highly successful (even if their spacecraft tried to kill the astronauts along the way), Congress was like “eh this is expensive no more funding for that crap”. And funding stopped. During that though NASA engineers came up with the idea of a space shuttle. It was going to be cheap, reusable, easy to maintain, highly launchable and profitable. It was only one of those things, and even that was a bit of a spotty record (*cough* challenger *cough cough hack* columbia *cough*). So that flew for a time. At this point though NASA was starting to very heavily focus on probes and stuff. Cause you know, electronics only need a bit of electricity. People need a lot more stuff to work. They’re also more expensive. Then the shuttle was retired around 2010 or so after the mostly final completion of the ISS, a big floaty space house and from it starting to show its age, being almost 30 year old technology (not to say that's bad since the Soyuz has been operating for over 50 years, but even that had updates). Around this time plans for the space launch system was developed, NASA’s in house heavy launch vehicle intended for interplanetary exploration (or at least lunar...) But also around this time the commercialization of space started to happen, with the most notable player right now being SpaceX, now launching actual stuff relatively regularly into orbit and for cheaper, considering the partial reusability of their first stage and also a number of other economic factors allowing them to reduce overhead. However, smaller competitors also existed in a commercial resupply and crewed vehicle competition. My personal favorite is the Sierra Nevada Corporations Space Systems Dreamchaser. It’s like a shuttle in that it glides back to a landing but instead uses a more lifting body design and is also not designed to hold stupidly big cargo because the CIA wasn’t involved (yeah the DoD wanted the cargo bay of the shuttle to be so big for some reason. Was kinda useful for Hubble though. And the ISS). And that brings it to today! That’s all folks. (Or maybe not - Who knows time marches on!)
Credit to @Ultimate Steve from the KSP forums for help verifying history and informing me of things I didn’t know about.
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