The Space Race and ultimately the Apollo Programme owes it existence to the pioneers of rocketry and in particular one Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977).
Herr Von Braun was not the first to dream of space and experiment with rockets though, this honour goes to Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth but it was Von Braun who attracted the attention of his Nazi masters with his successes whilst working under Hermann Oberth in their liquid propelled rocked tests and was appointed as director of the German Military Rocket Programme in 1932.
| V2 Rocket | |
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| Courtesy: NASA | |
In December of 1934 the first successful tests of the A2 rockets were carried out.
In 1936 the A3 rocket was in final planning and work began on the soon to be famous A4 rocket ( known as V2).
Testing of the A4 rocket began in March of 1941 and the first successful launch followed in October 1942.
As the end of the war drew close, Hitler decreed that all the scientists at work on the programme were to be executed and their work destroyed to prevent it falling into the hands of the allies.
Von Braun however managed to escape this fate and rescued many of the designs and diagrams for his work with the help of the US in an operation code named 'paperclip'.
February 1946, Von Braun launch the first V2 rocket launched in the US, traveling 244 miles into space and reaching a top speed of 5510mph. The US space program was born, but they were not alone in the race.
By the Early 1930's Sergei Korolev (1960-1966) became the co-founder of the USSR rocketry organisation.
His interest grew as he watched the testing of the V2's by von Braun's team and he was inspired in his own pursuit of rockets.
His own work was halted however, during the peak of Stalin's purges in 1937-38 when he was thrown, alongside other prominent aerospace engineers, into the Soviet prison system.
With World War 2 about to start for the USSR, Stalin was to recognise how important these engineers could be and they were retrieved to work on new weapons for the army, a system was set up so Stalin could take advantage of the engineers that were in jail.
At the end of the war Sergei Korolev (1960-1966) was released from Soviet prison and made Chief Constructor for the development of a long range ballistic missile. In 1948 his copy of the A4 known as the R1 was tested and his work continued until the launch of Russia's first ICBM the R-7 in 1953 effectively starting the USSR's space programme.
And now the Space Race was underway.
Interesting to note at this point that the leading designer with the US programme had in fact been responsible for designing weapons of mass destruction for the Nazi's and yet escaped prosecution.
The Race:
| The Vanguard Explosion | |
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| Courtesy: NASA |
June 1957 US first ballistic missile Vanguard explodes on the launch pad, it was intended to put the first satellite into orbit.
4 October 1957 the world was stunned as the Soviet R7ICBM launched Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, into orbit.
3 November 1957 Sputnik 2 took the first living organism (a dog named Laika) into space.
31 January 1958 the US Jupiter C launched Explorer 1 into orbit.
The US shocked by being so comprehensively beaten in the race for space established NASA in 1958, but the USSR continued to succeed in space while the US struggled to catch up.
In 1959 Lunik 2 became the first man made object to reach the moon, and later that year Lunik 3 took pictures of the far side of the moon, a region that had never before been seen.
The US then decided to use von Braun's talents more directly in their space program and moved him and his team into NASA in 1960, where the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) was established, with its directive to develop rockets for space exploration.
von Braun was to serve as the first director of the MSFC from 1960 to 1970.
April 12 1961 Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 became the first human being blasted into space.
May 5 1961 Alan Sheppard became the first American in space (all be it a sub-orbital flight)
Feb 20 1962 John Glenn, aboard Mercury 6, became the first American in orbit.
1966 Sergei Korolev, was to die in a botched operation the plan had been for the USSR to send a man to the moon by 1967
By this time the US had spent 6 years developing the Apollo Command Service Module and the Lunar Module, and the Saturn V rockets and were on course for the completion of the Apollo program, by the end of the 1960's.
After 8 years of development accompanied by many test flights (unmanned and manned, testing all the systems including Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 that actually orbited the Moon), July 16 1969 saw the launch of Apollo 11, the first formal attempt by man to land on the moon.
On July 20 1969 came the words 'the eagle has landed' and Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the surface of another planetary body.
Although they had lost to the USSR in the space race consistently from the late 50's and into the early 60's, the Apollo program changed this, finally the US had got its act together, made a collective decision with the Apollo program and led by von Braun they had won the final, most important battle in the space race. Or did they?
An interesting point to note is that the second world war had a massive impact on the future of humans in space. Clearly the development of rocketry was pushed along by the war but also had Germany won the war, von Braun would possibly never have left for the US. The result could then have been that Germany would have become the first nation in space and perhaps even dominated the space race and become the first to reach the moon. Further to which is the nagging feeling that if the US had acted with the same tenacity as it does today in relation to terror and weapons of mass destruction they would never have made it into space or felt the necessity to lie about their achievements. Had von Braun's missiles been able to reach the USA during the war...well I'll leave that thought with you and continue on to the evidence of their great deception.