Another private spacecraft, the Cygnus capsule being developed by Orbital Sciences Corp. Cygnus is due to fly atop Orbital's Taurus 2 rocket in May. Another burgeoning field of commercial spaceflight is the suborbital space tourist industry. A leader in this market is Mojave, Calif. The first powered flights have not been announced, but experts are hoping to see SpaceShipTwo's rocket engines ignited for flights sometime in These test flights will be a major step toward flying space tourists, more than of whom have already paid in full.
China, a growing player in space, is working on its own manned space station. This year the nation launched its first space station test module and conducted its first in-orbit rendezvous and docking. Though these spacecraft were unmanned, Chinese astronauts are expected to fly on a subsequent docking test flight in The Tiangong-1 module , launched Sept.
The robotic Shenzhou 8 mission launched Oct. The next docking missions, which will further develop this critical skill for building a space station, will be Shenzhou 9 and Shenzhou At least one of them will be crewed, Chinese officials have said. On Sept. The twin probes are due to arrive at their target on New Year's Day. They will stay in orbit around Earth's moon for about three months, tracking the moon's gravitational field by measuring minute changes in the distance between the two spacecraft due to gravitational variations.
LightSail-1 is an unmanned solar sail spacecraft being developed by the nonprofit Planetary Society, an organization that advocates space exploration.
Solar sail technology offers the potential to use the sun's radiation to push a spacecraft farther and faster than traditional propulsion does. The LightSail-1 vehicle is the first of three planned tests of the technology by the Planetary Society. It is due to launch sometime in LightSail-1 is made of three small cube-shaped spacecraft attached to four triangular Mylar sails arranged like a kite.
The vehicle will rely on pure sunlight for propulsion. Vesta is the second-most- massive body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. At Stanford, she earned four degrees, including a doctorate in physics in She also was an accomplished athlete who played varsity tennis at Stanford after being nationally ranked as a youth.
Ride received numerous honors and awards during the course of her career. One moment I will never forget is from when I was an astronaut. I remember floating over to the window for the first time, looking toward the horizon and seeing a very, very thin royal-blue line all the way across the horizon.
It looked like someone had taken a blue pencil and outlined the Earth. Then I realized that the blue line was Earth's atmosphere. It was memorable because it was obvious then how fragile and delicate our atmosphere is — there just isn't very much of it-- but it sure is important! I also received a Master of Science and doctorate degrees in physics from Stanford in and , respectively. I applied to NASA's astronaut program after reading an ad for it in a newspaper.
Over 8, men and women applied to the space program that year. Of the 35 individuals accepted, six were women, and I was one of them. This was in January In August , I completed a one-year training and evaluation period, which made me eligible for assignment as a mission specialist on future space shuttle flight crews.
While in training, I worked on the development of the shuttle's robot arm. My father was very, very inspirational. He was a middle-class, community college teacher in Southern California, and he put a real value on education. My father had gone through school on the GI Bill, and he wanted to make sure that his daughters knew the importance of education to get ahead in the world.
I also played a lot of competitive tennis growing up -- I loved science, but if I was outside I was playing tennis and so professional tennis player Billie Jean King was one of my role models. I am the first American woman to fly in space. I retired from NASA in after nine years of service. In I founded my own company, Sally Ride Science , to pursue my long-time passion of motivating girls and young women to pursue careers in science, math, and technology.
When black protesters marched on Cape Canaveral to protest the launch of Apollo 14, one Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader claimed, "America is sending lazy white boys to the moon because all they're doing is looking for moon rocks. If there was work to be done, they'd send a nigger. But another SCLC leader, Hosea Williams, made a softer claim, saying simply they were "protesting our nation's inability to choose humane priorities. The most magnificent thing I've seen in my whole life.
Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to lay out the case against the space program came from the sociologist Etzioni, in his now nearly impossible to find book, The Moon-Doggle: Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race. Luckily for you, I happen to have a copy sitting right here.
Etzioni attacked the manned space program by pointing out that many scientists opposed both the mission and the "cash-and-crash approach to science" it represented. He cites a report to the President from his Science Advisory Committee in which "some of the most eminent scientists in this country" bagged on our space ambitions. It concludes, "It would not be in the national interest to exploit space science at the cost of weakening our efforts in other scientific endeavors.
This need not happen if we plan our national program for space science and technology as part of a balanced effort in all science and technology. Etzioni goes on to note, and the chart above attests, that this "balanced effort" never materialized. The space budget was increased in the five years that followed by more than tenfold while the total American expenditure on research and development did not eve ndouble. Of every three dollars spent on research and development in the United States in , one went for defense, one for space, and the remaining one for all other research purposes, including private industry and medical research.
He keeps piling up the evidence that scientists opposed or at best, tepidly supported, the space program. A Science poll of scientists not associated with NASA found that all but 3 of them "believed that the present lunar program is rushing the manned stage. Etzioni's final assessment—"most scientists agree that from the viewpoint of science there is no reason to rush a man to the moon"—seems accurate.
But that's just the beginning of the book. He has many other arguments against the Apollo program: It sucked up not just available dollars, but our best and brightest. Robots could do our exploration better than humans, anyway. We would fall behind in other sciences because of our dedication to putting men on the moon. There were special problems with fighting the Cold War into space.
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