Sending Humans into Space
Many technologies are needed to get any object out of the earth’s atmosphere, one of which is the great rate of speed the aircraft must be traveling.
One of the great advancements of high speed travel was reaching the speed of sound. This first occurred on October 14, 1947 with the airplane known as the Bell XS-1 #1. After this accomplishment many attempts at flying at transonic speeds were attempted, but all were failures until mach 2 was reached on November 20, 1955 with the NACA X-15A-2 aircraft. But by this time, the U.S. space program was well on its way.
The first American satellite to achieve orbit was the Explorer 1, which was launched on January 31, 1958, four months after the world’s first successful spacecraft, the Russian Sputnik 1, achieved the same task. The explorer 1 stayed in space for 12 years and completed 58,000 orbits. The Explorer 1 also confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt.
There were 54 Explorer spacecraft after the Explorer 1, the last one being launched in 1975. The Explorers that were successfully launched collected information about space particles, fields, radiation, and a few other miscellanies. The Explorer program has been the most extensive in the history of American space exploration.
Following the Explorer program was the Mercury program, which had the objective of placing an American astronaut in outer space for the first time. The first two Mercury missions completed successful unmanned sub-orbital capsule tests. The next two Mercury missions, the Mercury Little Joe 3 and the Mercury Little Joe 4, each with a crew of a Rhesus monkey, completed sub-orbital capsule tests with biomedical and escape systems testing.
The Mercury MR-3 (Freedom 7) mission completed the first American manned space flight, lasting 15 minutes on May 5, 1961, making Alan Sheperd the first American in space.
On February 20, 1962 the first American manned orbital space flight completed three orbits in 4 hours 55 minutes.
After the Mercury program, two spacecraft, called the Fire 1 and Fire 2, were used to investigate the heating environment encountered by a spacecraft entering the earth’s atmosphere at high speed.
this work may be reproduced freely, however, no there is no guarantee in its accuracy. For entertainment and educational purposes only.