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1912 Balloon flight - Discovered cosmic rays (Europe)
1946 NRL V-2 rocket (USA)
1957 SPUTNIK 1 - First artificial satellite (USSR)
1969 APOLLO 11 - First manned lunar landing (USA)
1970 LUNA 17 - USSR Lunar Lander and Rover
1973 SKYLAB - America´s first Space Station
1990 Hubble Space Telescope (USA and Europe)
1996 MARS 96
Future Missions
1998 Planet B - Japan Mars Orbiter
1999 STARDUST - USA Comet Sample Return
2001 Pluto-Express (USA Pluto Flyby)
This was only a short overview of space explorations. It may take over an hour to discuss all explorations. There were more than 150 trials to explore our space. But almost 20% of them failed. A long time the USSR and the U.S.A. didn´t work together. Each of them wanted to be better and faster than the other. For example: the first man on the moon. The Americans won this "competition". Today, they work together, and it´s the better way. There are no two parallel projects. This saves a lot of time and money.
In the last weeks we have heard a lot of news of the Russion space-station MIR. The mir module was launched on 19 February 1986. During the ten years MIR has been orbiting earth, it has been home to 62 people from 24 crews, from more than a dozen countries including Afghanistan, Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Japan, Syria, United Kingdom and the United States. One of these, Russian cosmonaut Dr. Valeri Polyakov, has spent a total of 22 months in space and holds the record for th longest consecutive days in space. By now the technical instruments have been updated. In the last weeks there were a lot of errors and malfunctions on board.
But why do we spent thousands of millions for such projects? Only to get stones from the moon or mars of which we are not able to make practical use? Space exploration seems to be unuseful. But there are a lot of products developed in the space. For example our mobile telephones. First they were use for space exploration, then for war and now every 7th person has an own handy. But are not only technical by-products of space explorations. Medicaments also are produced in the space.
Another question is how we can justify all the expeditions on space-programmes when, we are still unable to feed all the people on our own planet? I think money is not the point in this problem. It's our society, we wouldn't life in a 1st world country, if we didn't spend a lot of money in our research departements.
There will be a lot of trials in the future and I am sure that we will make greater discoveres than we have ever made. In the future we will be able to use a higher, better and faster technology. Today we have reached a point, where we are able to leave our planet without problems. But in the future we will be able to reach a new dimension of space exploration.
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