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Scienceessay
Scienceessay
Scienceessay
Timothy Murphy
Ms. Perone
Space Essay
28 March 2017
program has landed people on the Moon. They have had many successful space missions.
However, the program has had a lot of failures and great tragedies.
The beginning of when the U.S. Space Program became a serious effort was when the
Soviet Union launched the worlds first artificial satellite. When the Soviets did this they began
what is known as the Space Race. Now that there was a competition, in 1958, NASA was
established. NASAs earliest goal was to send an American into Space. They wanted to
accomplish this goal through Project Mercury. They recruited seven astronauts for the job and on
May 5,1961 Alan Shepard, one of the seven astronauts, became the first American in Space.
After they accomplished this they moved on to their next goal, sending a man to the moon and
returning him. This was announced in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy and was finally
achieved in 1969 by Neil Armstrong and his crew in the Apollo 11 mission.
After that mission, which was one of their greatest, they decided to no longer send
anyone past the moon and they went on to a new strategy. That new strategy was to start using
robots to fly to other planets and observe them. With this new focus they have sent spacecrafts to
other planets such as Mercury, Saturn, and Uranus. The spacecrafts were then sent to explore the
outer boundaries of the Solar System. Due to these discoveries scientists knew more about the
area outside of our atmosphere. Every time they were successful in their goal they made a new
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one immediately and achieved it. Unfortunately, NASA frequently were unsuccessful for many
tries before they were successful. Along with this costing them a lot of time and money it also
costed them many lives. Many astronauts trained for years in the hopes of being able to be
known for something amazing but died before they were able to do it.
Over the last ten years many important events have taken place in NASA. They launched
the first teacher in space since the Challenger disaster in August 2007. In January of 2008 a
probe was sent up and came within 124 miles of hitting Mercury. Unfortunately, in July of 2011
NASA launched the Atlantis, which would become the last shuttle to be launched into space.
With this end of NASA sending up shuttles their focused has shifted to sending robots to far
away planets to explore them. I think that NASA should have kept sending people into space but
Works Cited
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. "A Brief History of Space
http://www.aerospace.org/education/stem-outreach/space-primer/a-brief-history-of-space-
exploration/
https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/space-timeline.html