Spacecraft Technology: The Early Years
Charting the early Space Age, from the launch of Sputinik 1 in 1957 to the landing of men on the Moon, this book is a celebration of the importance of that early technology in shaping our global culture.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Spacecraft Technology: The Early Years
Chapter 11: An Epilogue to the Space Race
The impossible of today will become the possible of tomorrow
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
The early years of the Space Age, from the late 1950s to the early1970s, are seen by many as the Golden Age of space exploration, chiefly because the period saw such incredible advances in space technology and culminated in the landing of men on the Moon. By the end of the 1960s, all of the technology necessary to send unmanned spacecraft to the planets and astronauts to our nearest astronomical neighbour had been designed, developed and successfully flown in space and it had been done in little more than a decade.
While the race for the Moon provided a boost to many aspects of space technology, there were other social, political and technical reasons for space-related development, as previous chapters have attempted to show. This chapter draws those strands of technological heritage together and looks at the broader effects of space technology on our culture.
Space technology development
The development of space launch vehicles from sounding rockets and converted ballistic missiles opened the gateway to space. And once it was open, there was no turning back. Political competition between the Cold War superpowers saw to that.
Continued developments in rocket technology allowed larger and heavier pay-loads to be launched into higher and longer-lived orbits, resulting in a host of communications, remote sensing and science applications. Although many of the launch attempts were failures, it seems remarkable today that so much effort was made in those early...
Copyright The Institution of Electrical Engineers 2006 under license agreement with Books24x7
