Anniversaries of space exploration

Armstrong, Collins & Aldrin - Photo NASA

Fifty years after the arrival of man on the Moon, a couple of European sexagenarians remember the first landing:

“Do you know what day is today?”

“Saturday, why?”

“I mean the date.”

“July 20th 2019, what about it?”

“Exactly fifty years ago, man reached the Moon.”

“Oh yeah! But wait, there is something wrong here, didn’t they arrive on the twenty-first?”

"No, it was the twentieth, but it took them over six hours to get down from the capsule. By then, in Europe it was the twenty-first, but in the United States it was still the twentieth.”

“True! I remember it well. I saw it on TV. I was ten years old.”

“Me too.”

NASA goes back to space

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon
NASA Images at the Internet Archive

In the early 1960s, the Soviet Union took the lead in the space race. At the end of that decade, the United States took over with the Apollo Project, which in 1968 began to launch manned flights (Apollo 7), in 1969 put for the first time two men on the Moon (Apollo 11), and until December 1972 made five more lunar landings, the last of which was Apollo 17. Since then, mankind has not returned to the Moon, although there have been several unmanned automatic lunar landings.

From the 1980s, NASA changed tactics and began using space shuttles for its manned flights. These ships differed from the previous ones because the shuttle was reusable: when returning to Earth, it could land in a similar way to an airplane, rather than descending on the sea, like the capsules of the Apollo project. In all, five shuttles were built, named Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavor. 

Space as a point of concord for humanity

Start of a V-2 rocket in 1943

The exploration of space began some seventy years ago, as a continuation of the Third Reich’s war effort to develop ballistic missiles (the V-2 rocket) to bombard Britain and other places without the need of airplanes.

At the end of World War II, the two new great powers (the United States and the Soviet Union) recruited the scientists and technicians who had carried out the German advances in that field, took them to their respective countries and started programs of space exploration, whose first objective was, of course, to obtain military advantages in the cold war that had just begun. As a result of Operation Paperclip (the US recruitment program), German scientists as important as Werner von Braun went to work in the United States. An equivalent Soviet program (the Operation Osoaviakhim) did the same with other German scientists, perhaps less known, but equally efficient. With their help, both superpowers began a space race that would last several decades.

The Chinese on the Moon

The hidden face of the moon

On January 2, a Chinese spacecraft landed on the opposite side of the moon.

The fact that the moon rotates around its axis in the same time that it revolves in an elliptical orbit around the Earth has the consequence that our satellite always shows us the same face. For several centuries, the hidden face of the moon was an enigma. In 1870, the science-fiction novel Around the Moon, by Jules Verne, leaves open the possibility that in the hidden face of the moon there could be air, water, life, and even intelligent inhabitants. While the three travelers pass over the hidden face during the lunar night, unable to see anything on the surface, a sudden flash of light caused by a meteor shower illuminates for a moment the hidden area and shows them clouds, seas, forests... or at least that’s what the dazzled observers think they have seen.