Fulfilling the Dreams of a President.
August 6th 2008 08:50
Apollo 11 patch
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
Rice University
Was the purpose of a manned lunar mission to study the internal structure of the moon, surface composition, how the surface structure was formed and the age of the moon. Was this just a scientific fact finding mission?
It was a combination of scientific and political principals. There was the kudos of being the first to the Moon, the US and the former Soviet Union were locked in a race for political reasons and perhaps partly because of the promise made by late J.F. Kennedy, any scientific discoveries were just icing on a rather cold war political cake.
The Soviet Union was ahead of the US in this effort. So far, they had placed the first artificial satellite in orbit, with the launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth! From the time he entered office in 1961, President John F. Kennedy made it a priority to place a man on the moon.
Apollo 11 cleared the way for the first formal attempt at a manned lunar landing. The launch had its problems a frozen liquid oxygen valve threatened to put a stop to the launch. The first human journey to the surface of the Moon began at Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, Florida with the liftoff of Apollo 11 on a Saturn V booster on16 July 1969.
The climate of manned space exploration has changed after Apollo 13 the world lost interest in manned space missions, there were other problems is South East Asia, it was time to think about what was happening here on earth.
In my youth I was fascinated by new technology, the thought of interplanetary space travel was an adventure that I wanted to be in. I still have the same fascination I had previously had, although now my views on manned space travel have changed over the last few decades.
We proved that humans are capable of space travel. We should continue to explore the frontiers of space. Manned space travel is not the only alternative why risk the health and safety of humans when, smart robot equipped space craft can do a much better job and do cost effectively. The thought of taking a trip to mars is still a nostalgic, perhaps even romantic notion, but from a human perspective not a practical one.
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