Missions


 * Use this page to record what you find out about missions to space; remember to make good use of subheadings and add your citations to the Bibliography' page. **

In 1961 Yuri Gagarin was the first person to leave earth; he spent about 90 minutes in space and returned back. Other astronauts spent longer time in space after. The longest time a person has spent in space is a little over a year, but when the astronaut returned it took over months to regain his strength. April 1971 the first space station was made, it was named Salyut 1, 3 astronauts lived in it for 24 days, but when they tried to return it didn’t work and all the men died. There were 6 other Salyut space stations that were very successful. In the space station the astronauts did experiments while the astronauts were in space. Project Skylab was the first US space station, NASA used extra rockets from Apollo (moon missions) to make Skylab successful. Skylab launched in 1973.

Gemini had 4 objectives. 1) NASA wanted to keep astronauts in space for a longer duration, because this would tests to see how long men could stay in the air without freaking, also it was a test to see if the spaceship could carry more food, and that would be necessary for going to the moon. 2) NASA also wanted to see if they send out a spaceship earlier for the other spaceship that goes out with people to rendezvous with the other ship to gain more fuel and lighten the load.3) NASA wanted to see if the spaceship could land in specific area and to see how the reentry worked.4) NASA also wanted to gain more information about the weightless crew members and the physiological reactions to it. The Apollo Mission started May 25, 1961 the day John F. Kennedy made a speech of landing humankind on the Moon after the speech it took 8 years to launch the first Apollo mission.

__Apollo 7__ On October eleventh,ninteteen sixty-eight, Apollo seven successfully launched three men, Walter M. Shirra,(Commander)Donn F. Eisele,(Command Module Pilot) and R. Walter Cunningham(Lunar Module Pilot) into space. The crew was supposed to fly a second mission after Apollo one, which was canceled,but they later became the backup crew for Apollo one, which was later rescheduled. The backup crew on Apollo seven became the crew on the Apollo ten mission. The crew orbited around the moon one hundred sixty-three times. Then they safely landed on October twenty-second, nineteen sixty-eight.

__Apollo History__

At the beginning of the space program, NASA filled rockets with pure oxygen: the only gas people needed to breathe. But during an //Apollo 1// training session, the 100% oxygen atmosphere caused a fire to spread so fast that the three-man crew was killed in a matter of seconds. After that tragedy, NASA started mixing the air with nitrogen during ground tests. Nitrogen slows fires, and people are used to breathing nitrogen and oxygen because natural air is four parts nitrogen and one part oxygen.

The official Gemini spacecraft was designed January 3, 1962. That Spacecraft is 5.8m (19 ft) long and about 3810 kilograms (8400 lb).

The first Gemini crew to go into space was Neil A. Armstrong and David A. Scott. The titan rocket 2 is twice as powerful as Redstone. This rocket launched the Gemini spacecraft to space.

These were Gemini 8s stats Altitude: 298.7km (161.3 nm) Inclination: 28.91 degrees Orbits: 7 Duration: 0 Days, 10 hours, 41 min, 26 seconds

The Commander [|Virgil Grissom] nicknamed the ship molly brown.

__ Glory __ On March 4th the Glory space craft took off to an successful flight near Lompoc, California. The original flight was scheduled for February 23 2011, but was postponed due to a malfunction in ground support equipment. The launch took place on March 4, 2011, at 2:09:43 am. The Taurus XL rocket's first three stages functioned as planned, but the nose cone (also known as the [|payload fairing] ) failed to separate 2 minutes 58 seconds after the launch. The nose cone covers and protects the satellite during launch and ascent, and is designed to separate and fall away shortly after the launch. Due to the failure of the nose cone to separate, the rocket remained too heavy to reach the correct orbit. According to launch director Omar Baez, the satellite and launcher probably ended up in the [|southern Pacific Ocean]. The failure was estimated to have cost at least $424 million. Amazingly, this is the cost of only the satellite, and not the cost of the launcher and launch services. During the previous failed Taurus XL launch, the vehicle and services were estimated to have cost $54m.