The history of the future: how humanity makes its way into space
Cosmic story humanity with each decade will lose more and more details. The greater the success we will achieve, the less significant the very important achievements of the past will seem. Perhaps, schools should not study the history of political confrontations, bloodshed and strife, but the impressive way of our scientific and technological progress.
Over the past 70 years, mankind has sent a wide variety of spacecraft into space. Few people doubt that the future of our civilization is connected with the cosmos. Despite the many troubles and conflicts, a huge number of various marketing and media "lures", space still "poach" the best minds of mankind. Moreover, he is a dream not only of the intellectual elite, but also of almost all children on the planet, which means that the “last frontier of humanity” will be overcome sooner or later. Let's try to consider some important milestones of the space path. Perhaps today many of them seem insignificant, and after the first interstellar flight they will become completely amusing, like a wooden bicycle against the backdrop of a Formula 1 car. Nevertheless, it was precisely these scientific and technical feats that showed how much success an idea that captures the minds of many people can achieve.
Start, Fow 2
Maybe someday it will be awkward for us to tell our brothers in mind about how our journey into space began. Like many of our best achievements, military technologies have paved the way to space. The V-2 missile, developed by the German Nazis, was the first aircraft to reach near space.
The V-2 rocket became the basis for the development of the V-2 rocket, which removed the first video of the Earth from space
After the war, on the basis of this rocket, the first American and Soviet rockets were created, capable of “bouncing” to an altitude of up to 200 km (the height of the ISS orbit is about 400 km).
Even before the launch of the first satellite, two dogs flew to the height of 2 km on the Soviet P-16 1957 in May of 210. Before 1960, a dozen such launches took place.
In the USA, the V-2 rocket was created based on the same V-2, which was also used to study near-Earth space, and with even greater scope. In total, from 1946 to 1951, Americans performed more than 80 flights to a height of more than 160 km.
Some of these flights were especially valuable, for example, during one of them the first video of the Earth from space was received. Also, fruit flies, seeds of various plants, mice and macaques flew on V-2 rockets into the near-Earth space.
These flights yielded a huge amount of scientific information about conditions at extremely high altitudes. The missiles developed for the war returned to Earth with valuable information about solar radiation, the parameters of the ionosphere and the upper atmosphere. Without these data, it would have been impossible to further explore space, because before the first rocket flights we knew practically nothing about it.
First satellite
In a few hundred years, will the launch of a satellite be considered the first step of mankind into space, or will this technological achievement seem too insignificant? It is difficult to answer this question, but today the first successful launch of a spacecraft into Earth orbit is a very significant event. In many ways, this experiment is the foundation on which the modern powerful satellite constellation stands, with all its outstanding advantages, such as GPS and global communication. Moreover, the satellite changed the history of the planet, became a powerful catalyst for scientific and technological progress.
The first satellite, the Soviet unit PS-1, launched 4 October 1957 of the year. A small device with a diameter of 58 cm carried on board the simplest by today's standards radio transmitter, which broadcast a simple beep-beep. Nevertheless, the signals of this satellite made even more noise than the test of a nuclear bomb - mankind for the first time demonstrated its power over the orbit.
The PS-1 satellite had a simple design, but it served as a powerful catalyst for the space race.
During the Cold War, the launch of the Soviet satellite caused a very strong US reaction. American politicians so frightened the success of the USSR that they literally “flooded” their aerospace sector with money.
It was at that time that the Pentagon created the Agency for Advanced Research Projects (later DARPA), and the US National Science Foundation increased its budget 4 times. But, most importantly, a year after the launch of PS-1, one of the largest space research organizations was created: President Eisenhower signed a decree establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA.
After the launch of the Soviet satellite, US citizens willingly agreed to astronomical spending on the Apollo lunar program, which largely ensured its success and became the next major technological achievement of mankind.
Saturn V
After the first satellite, mastering the orbit became a matter of time: spacecraft for people was difficult, but it was already on the shoulder of engineers. After the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the ways of fixing people in Earth orbit were outlined and it was necessary only to develop appropriate technologies.
But mankind has already set the following task, as always it looked beyond the barely mastered horizon - to the moon.
The main problem of the flight to the moon in those years was to create a sufficiently powerful launch vehicle that could lift a heavy spacecraft, a descent vehicle and deliver them to the satellite of our planet and back in a reasonable time.
In the US, it was a Saturn V rocket, and in the USSR - H1. Unfortunately, the Soviet project failed. Therefore, until now Saturn V remains the largest, highest, heaviest and most powerful launch vehicle that has ever taken off from the surface of the Earth. It was this rocket that brought people to the moon, which so far is the most outstanding achievement of manned cosmonautics.
The creation of Saturn V was spent enormous power and money. In particular, a huge building with a height of 50 floors was built to assemble the rocket. This building, called the VAB (Vertical Assembly), became the “home” for other major spacecraft, including the Space Shuttle.
Saturn V rockets were able to deliver people to the moon
Saturn V has a height of 111 m (36-storey building), weight 2800 t, thrust 34,5 million newtons. The rocket could throw record-breaking 118 T of the payload into Earth orbit, and the Moon about 50 T. The best heavy modern missiles cannot boast even half the values of the Saturn V payload.
Since the first unmanned test flights in the 1967 year, Saturn V has completed 13 successful launches. The rocket not only delivered people to the moon, but also launched the first US space station - Skylab.
Apollo
The Apollo spacecraft is the first ship that brought people to the surface of another celestial body. Due to the imperfect 1960 technology, the creation of Apollo was a search for very complex tradeoffs.
Apollo descent module
Apollo consisted of a descent module lunar weighing 4,8 t and 30-ton streamlined command and service module, the design of which today serves as the basis for many projects of "private" American spacecraft.
Inside the descent module Apollo lunar
The command and service module consisted of two parts: the service module itself and the apparatus designed to return to the earth’s atmosphere from the lunar orbit at a very high speed — 39 000 km / h. The service module had a powerful engine for leaving the lunar orbit. During the mission, a descent module with two astronauts aboard was separated from the command and service module, and the third crew member remained in orbit in the command module. After performing all the tasks on the surface of the moon, the descent module took off, docked with the service module, and Apollo was serving back to Earth.
Apollo spacecraft
The Apollo descending lunar module turned out to be incredibly reliable, while the service module presented unpleasant surprises: it caused the death of the Apollo 1 crew and almost killed the Apollo 13 crew. In the second case, people managed to escape and survive in the descent module.
Service command module Apollo in comparison with other ships
Fifty years ago, Apollo was the peak of technical excellence, but the huge risk that astronauts put themselves on is obvious, flying on such a primitive device with a minimum of automatic devices and backup systems.
"Venus" and "Vega"
Today, not everyone will be able to answer the question: “On what planet did the first unmanned probes descend from Earth”? Many will say that they are on Mars, because they have forgotten about the incredible achievements of the Soviet space program, which for the first time in history could plant earth technology on the planet of the solar system, and not on Mars, but on Venus.
Between the 1961 and 1984 years of the USSR, 16 sent probes to Venus, 8 of which successfully landed on the surface of the planet and transmitted information. In 1985, two more probes, Vega-1 and Vega-2, landed successfully on Venus. Thus, 10 landings of unmanned vehicles were made on Venus, but only 7 vehicles were successfully landing on Mars.
The first soft landing on another planet was provided by the 1180-kg probe "Venus-7", which dropped the 500-kg descent module into the atmosphere of Venus, which successfully landed and collected data on the conditions on the surface of the neighbor of the Earth.
The device "Venus-13" sent color images of the Venusian surface to the ground
The following probes, "Venus-9" and "Venus-10", took the first photographs of the surface of Venus, and "Venus-13" and "Venus-14" performed the first ever drilling on another planet.
Vega probes had an unparalleled payload
The Vega-1 and Vega-2 devices are also unique. They first photographed the comet's core: probes made 1500 images of Halley's comet. In addition, the apparatus "Vega" dropped into the atmosphere of Venus two balloons with scientific equipment. The balloons floated for two days in the atmosphere of Venus at an altitude of 54 km, collecting invaluable data about another planet. So far these are the only balloons that have worked outside the Earth, on another planet. In addition, the Vega probes dropped the descent vehicles that successfully landed on the surface of Venus and worked for about 20 minutes.
Scheme of flight apparatus "Vega"
The devices of the Vega series were heavy “monsters” weighing almost 5000 kg. For comparison, the modern (1997 launch) the largest American Cassini probe weighed at the start of the 5712 kg.
Hundreds of dates and titles
All this is only a tiny part of the vast experience of space exploration. Hundreds of projects, names, missions, thousands of discoveries and dozens of unique machines with "impossible" characteristics - all this is our way into space. Hopefully, in the end, this path will become more important than political games, economic statistics, and will provide mankind with the golden age of peace and abundance.
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