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Dr. Joseph J. Essid, Writing Center Director
jessid@richmond.edu Personal Web Site
Office Hour Zoom Room: click here You may schedule an appointment (please e-mail me 10 am-5pm please).
About the Class:
When I first taught The Space Race in Fall 2016, human exploration of the cosmos seemed mostly to be a matter of nostalgia for the Apollo years, when Cold-War rivalry made JFK's "man moon decade" promise plausible. Landing on the Moon again? A distant prospect.
By 2023, however, the class has taken a turn, based upon a few changed realities: the successes of private ventures like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the emergence of China as a new space rival, partnering with Russia to build a base at the Moon's South Pole in the next decade. India also has been active with human space travel and current is preparing for their first launches with crew sometime in this decade. As I prepared this syllabus, that nation made the first-ever soft landing at the Moon's South Pole, a region thought to be full of resources, including water ice.
This semester we'll both look backward and forward. Whatever happens, it now appears likely that all of us will live to see a new era of human spaceflight, in some form. The unanswered questions of this "Second Space Age," as some observers call it, merit study in an academic setting.
What We Do in This FYS Section:
As Writing Center Director, I'm going to push you to improve your work. I'm a good mentor at this; my 30+ years here have taught me that nearly all UR first-years (whatever their high-school experiences) do not know how to write effective analysis for professors, use sources well, or include nuanced, interesting writing at the paragraph or sentence level.
In the end, you'll all finish my section better at analysis, careful use of language, and the basics of the sort of original research many of you will go on to do in more advanced courses. A few of you will be invited to become Writing Consultants who work for me, as does our Writing Consultant, who will meet with you as you write and revise your drafts.
Required Texts: click here to order at UR or elsewhere. Again, be sure you have the right edition. Don't make extra work for yourself. If page references in papers are not correct, you'll get a Zero for the paper until you get them right from the correct edition.
Hansen, First Man
Loeb, Extraterrestrial
Wolfe, The Right Stuff
Other short readings linked to syllabus or provided by me
Feature Films (see schedule for links to streaming or YouTube):
Chazelle, dir. First Man
Cuarón, dir. Gravity
Howard, dir. Apollo 13
Kimball, dir. Man in Space
Melfi, dir. Hidden Figures.
Klushantsev, dir. Road to the Stars
Saturn V liftoff on the way to the Moon
Dragon Spacecraft with Crew-2 Mission on the way to the Space Station, Friday April 23, 2021 dawn, over Goochland. First time I've seen a crewed launch. We saw the second stage separate, just before we lost sight of Dragon.
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