Description du livre
Nonetheless, in 1972 and 1973, nasa sent nine astronauts to spend extended periods of time living in a craft named skylab, the very first experimental american space station. Though skylab would not last long, and the international space station remains far more famous, skylab’s history is one of ingenuity and challenge, as well as how nasa found itself without a mission after the triumph of the apollo program.
Much has been written about the space race, which is still taught across america today, but the story of human space exploration is mostly one of cooperation. Even in the summer of 1969, the soviets had given the united states the flight plan for its luna 15 mission, allowing apollo 11 to avoid it. That was the first of many examples of cooperation in space between the united states and the soviet union during the cold war, and ultimately, their research and cooperation helped lead to the construction of the international space station (iss), a large space station assembled in earth’s orbit that represents the most ambitious international space project in history.
In november 1971, nasa’s mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to enter mars’ orbit, but the soviets’ mars 2 and mars 3 spacecrafts were hot on its heels. Mariner 9 was designed to orbit around mars, but the soviets’ spacecrafts had descent modules designed to actually land on the red planet’s surface. The descent module aboard mars 2 crash landed on mars’ surface on november 27, but less than a week later, mars 3’s descent module began its historic descent down to the surface. On december 2, 1971, after a few hours of descending, it successfully completed its “soft landing.”
Even had the soviet union managed to keep the probes a secret, it wouldn’t have mattered because both probes fell out of the sky before reaching earth’s orbit. The soviets’ rocket systems had failed, which would be a recurring problem for them throughout the 1960s. The race to mars was off to a rough start, but it had started nonetheless.