![]() ![]() Although other astronauts visited the lunar surface after Apollo 11, the triumphant first landing remains a pinnacle in spaceflight history.Īpollo 11 was successful only because of the missions that came before it. Project Apollo ran from 1961 to 1972, even though NASA accomplished Kennedy's goal in 1969. gross domestic product (GDP) at the time annually for approximately 10 years. government ended up allocating $25 billion in 1960s dollars to the Apollo program, or about 2.5% of the U.S. The announcement lit a fire under the teams at NASA to complete the task on a seemingly impossible timeline.īut the ambitious goal required an equally ambitious budget. Kennedy's famous speech at Rice Stadium the next year inspired Americans to dream big. Eisenhower's administration, but it's most strongly associated with Kennedy's declaration.) This seemingly impossible task quickly became the ultimate goal of the Apollo program, also known as Project Apollo. (The idea of a moon mission was first discussed during Dwight D. So, in 1961, Kennedy decided to take charge and proposed to Congress the goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the decade. But this expectation was not realized in the space race, and the Soviet Union beat the U.S. "There's an expectation that if anything's going to happen in science and technology, America's going to be first," Siddiqi said. was feeling on top as the country's economy grew. "Pretty much every single major event in the space race in the early days was a triumph of Soviet space achievement."Īfter World War II, Siddiqi explained, the U.S. "I think in America, at least, there a feeling of a great lack of self-confidence, a feeling of 'We are falling behind,'" Asif Siddiqi, a space historian at Fordham University in New York, told. But until the moon landing itself, the Soviet space program was ahead overall, with successful missions including Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth, and Luna 2, the first space probe to touch the moon. efforts in this contest included two predecessors to Project Apollo: Project Mercury, which began in 1958, and Project Gemini, which followed in 1961. The two Cold War rivals were both determined to outdo the other and land humans on the lunar surface first. This speech invoked a new urgency in the space race, which had been going on between the U.S. Kennedy famously declared in 1962 to a captivated crowd at Rice Stadium in Texas. Slideshow: How NASA's Apollo Astronauts Went to the Moon We choose to go to the moon ![]() ![]() Fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, people around the globe are once again reflecting on and celebrating the moon landing, the odds that were stacked against it and how it continues to influence spaceflight. ![]()
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