NASA: Tales of Triumph and Disaster - Part 1

40 years ago history was made worldwide, when the first man was landed on the moon. This will tell the ever continuing story of endeavours undertaken by the USA at the forefront of manned and unmanned space exploration.



The Astronauts part of the Mercury Mission

On July 1958 NASA was established, with one simple brief: to beat the Russians in the space race.  Drawn from military training pilots the hope was to get humans safely into space, but quickly and to a deadline.

During the 1950’s the American’s were still trailing the Russians in the space race.  NASA firstly established the Mercury programme to train seven astronauts to be ready for space. One included Alan Shepard who NASA selected for America’s first manned mission into space. Scientists at NASA were shaken as Russia launched their first manned space flight on the 15^th April 1961, only a few weeks before NASA’s first manned mission was to be launched.

On May 5^th Alan Shepard’s flight was still a history-making event. Whereas Yuri Gagarin had only been a ‘passenger’ in the vehicle, Shepard was able to manoeuvre the Freedom 7 space capsule himself.  Shepard made a safe return to Earth with a splashdown at sea and recovery by helicopter, even better still this was all captured on camera and broadcast to millions worldwide. As he returned to mainland America, he was honoured with parades in Washington, New York and Los Angeles.

This historic event signalled the first of many missions by NASA and further joint projects with various contries, including Great Britain, find out more in “NASA: Tales of Triumph and Disaster – Part 2” , coming soon)

The ISS: "Making the Invisible, Visible"

Currently we are using the equivalent of 1 and a half planets worth of resources in order to survive on earth. With the advancement of medical technology and discoveries, we have an ever increasing population. In the near future we will need to find another planet to live on.   

Previous Expedition 34 of the ISS

The ISS is carrying out investigations, testing out the conditions that humans would have to withstand to live on a planet such as Mars to solve this problem, without having to risk money and human health by sending shuttles to Mars or other prospective planets. Other experiments that the ISS carries out are in various fields, for example biology, human biology, physics, astronomy and meteorology (which is the study of the weather)

The ISS may be circling the earth at 7,706.6m/s at 370km, but the International Space Station does a lot more than that. The ISS was sent into orbit on the 20^th November 1998.The ISS has spent a staggering 5243 days in orbit, 4530 of them have been spent occupied, that’s nearly 12 and a half years.

The cost of construction of the ISS mounted up to a massive 150 billion US dollars. The size of the ISS is approximately the size of an American football field and it is the largest man made machinery that orbits the earth.  The ISS has been visited by astronauts and cosmonauts from 15 different nations

View of a spiral cloud from the ISS (@Cmdr_Hadfield 

The technology onboard the ISS allows pioneering research to be carried out, most of which could very well be put to good use within our lifetime. One of the many experiments is tissue culture. This is where living cells can be grown in an environment where the results are not distorted by the force of gravity. These results could be used to test for treatments of deadly diseases and illnesses like cancer, without risking harm to patients whilst the treatment is still in the production stages. NASA has already developed a Bioreactor device on earth that can be used to simulate these effects that happen in space.  Every so often the ISS needs to be serviced, like a car, to do this a Soyuz space shuttle is sent out to service the ISS and deliver any essential equipment or materials to the station. Recently on the 29^th March the Soyuz shuttle managed to reach the ISS in less than 6 hours, compared to the usual 2 days. This brings forward new prospects of space travel, potentially making journeys to planets such as Mars possibly achievable in a reasonable timespan.

The crew on board the ISS changes regularly. On-board the ISS currently is Commander Chris Hadfield and Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko who began their stay when they docked their Soyuz TMA-07M which transported the crew to the ISS on Dec. 21, 2012.The crew on Expedition 35 is scheduled to remain on-board until May 2013.

You can see when the ISS passes are online here for June http://www.meteorwatch.org/iss-international-space-station-uk-passes-june-2013/

. Follow @VirtualAstro on twitter for more information on astronomy or  @Cmdr_Hadfield for amazing photos from the ISS