The American and Soviet Space Programs The history of our space program is one not many people are familiar with. Most people today believe we had nothing until we captured the Nazi rocket technology. They believe the same for the old Soviet Union, but neither is true. While we weren’t doing much in rocket technology in World War II, it was because we basically put all that on hold. The point being we weren’t thinking of using advanced rockets as weapons, but the Germans continued their development with the basic idea of developing rocket weapons and eventually weapons which could be fired at the earth from space. The Germans had a different mindset when it came to space and rockets. A famous American rocket scientist was working on rockets before World War II and it is believed some of the ideas the Germans got were from his breakthroughs. The scientist was Robert H. Goddard. An example of this is, he is credited with building the first liquid fueled rocket. He was actually not only an aerospace engineer, but also a physicist and an inventor. He began launching rockets in 1926 and stopped in 1941, the year we entered the war. When we look at things, he patented, we can find he had a patent for a multi-stage rocket. Where would we be today without that? I am sure the Germans probably latched onto two of his inventions which were special gyroscopes and steerable thrust. When we stopped rocket development, Goddard died before the war ended. At this point we made a decision. The decision was based on the fear that the Soviet Union would seize all the Nazi rocket scientists, which would give them a tremendous lead in space and they would use this knowledge to create weapons to terrorize the world. Because of this we sort of forgave the Nazis who were in the rocket program and brought as many of them here as we could get our hands on in a special operation, named operation Paper Clip. At least some of these scientists and engineers were guilty of murder in that they had worked slave laborers to death in their rocket factories. It was said Von Braun had also used slave laborers and didn’t care it they lived or died. Another story talks about these people celebrating Hitler’s birthday every year in the United States and wearing Nazi buttons. At this point we began to restart our space program. In 1955 the United States claimed it was going to launch a satellite, but four days later the U.S.S.R. made the same announcement and as the world knows they were able to get Sputnik into orbit way before us, scaring many countries in the world, including us. People were thinking they now could put nuclear weapons into orbit over our heads. After that event which occurred in 1957, they put the first man into space in 1961. It seemed we were hopelessly behind in space. The United States was taking these setbacks very seriously and eventually managed to match them. In 1958 we launched our first satellite Explorer 1. The same year we managed to send a man into space. We were beginning to catch up, but the Soviet Union still had us beat in powerful rockets. They became over confident. In 1960, the Soviet scientists decided to fix a problem with a rocket on the launch pad without emptying the fuel and the rocket blew up. It killed many Soviet military including Marshal Mitrofan Ivanovich Nedelin and the engineer who designed the rocket. This was kept secret until the 1990s. If they would have been in the block house instead of sitting on the launch pad, they all would have been saved, but once the Marshall decided to sit outside, no one else wanted to look like a coward. The United States was starting to build rockets which were much more reliable. We were able to start the Gemini Program which ran between 1961 to 1966, and we sent ten astronauts into space under the program. The president of the United States had announced a manned Moon program in 1961 and this caused a scramble in the Soviet Union to beat us there, but were denying these programs existed in case they didn’t make it. They had two different programs going at once and succeeded in launching robotic moon probes between 1959 and 1976, but they never got a human there. As the world knows after the United States started the Apollo Program, we were able to accomplish a human moon landing using Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. Then it happened in 1972, Apollo 17 landed on the moon and then we just stopped sending rockets there, or maybe hid the fact, there is no way to be sure. We were told the American public lost interest and that is why we were stopping. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. We left a few unused Saturn V rockets which had already been built for the mission. Several space stations were built by the United States and the Soviet Union over the years, and eventually the International Space Station was built. After that the Chinese started building space station some years later, and it seems they may have surpassed the Russians. The Russians for their part have announced their intention to build a space station of their own in a couple of years. We have gotten to the point where not only do we theoretically have a government rocket almost ready to fly a test flight around the moon, but also a rocket from SpaceX said to be able to accomplish this feat. Many people think the rocket from SpaceX, known as Starship was built to equal the Artemis rocket, but that is not true. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy was built for that. Starship was built to surpass Artemis in every way. It was built by a private company, costing the public zero dollars. It can hold one hundred people and is more powerful than Artemis and incredibly cheaper to launch than Artemis. Some say we should scrap the Artemis rocket and replace it with Starship. Starship is also fully reusable. The question is why are we playing around with Artemis and spending billions of dollars for it when it is also many years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget? We are on the verge of at least being able to explore our closest neighbors in the solar system. We need more speed and better protection for humans as they fly through very dangerous space, but we are innovators, and we have proved this time and time again.
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