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Timothy Murphy

Ms. Perone

Space Essay

28 March 2017

Space Exploration Essay

The American Space Program has done many great things over its existence. The

program has landed people on the Moon. They have had many successful space missions.

However, the program has had a lot of failures and great tragedies.

The beginning of when the U.S. Space Program became a serious effort was when the

Soviet Union launched the worlds first artificial satellite. When the Soviets did this they began

what is known as the Space Race. Now that there was a competition, in 1958, NASA was

established. NASAs earliest goal was to send an American into Space. They wanted to

accomplish this goal through Project Mercury. They recruited seven astronauts for the job and on

May 5,1961 Alan Shepard, one of the seven astronauts, became the first American in Space.

After they accomplished this they moved on to their next goal, sending a man to the moon and

returning him. This was announced in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy and was finally

achieved in 1969 by Neil Armstrong and his crew in the Apollo 11 mission.

After that mission, which was one of their greatest, they decided to no longer send

anyone past the moon and they went on to a new strategy. That new strategy was to start using

robots to fly to other planets and observe them. With this new focus they have sent spacecrafts to

other planets such as Mercury, Saturn, and Uranus. The spacecrafts were then sent to explore the

outer boundaries of the Solar System. Due to these discoveries scientists knew more about the

area outside of our atmosphere. Every time they were successful in their goal they made a new
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one immediately and achieved it. Unfortunately, NASA frequently were unsuccessful for many

tries before they were successful. Along with this costing them a lot of time and money it also

costed them many lives. Many astronauts trained for years in the hopes of being able to be

known for something amazing but died before they were able to do it.

Over the last ten years many important events have taken place in NASA. They launched

the first teacher in space since the Challenger disaster in August 2007. In January of 2008 a

probe was sent up and came within 124 miles of hitting Mercury. Unfortunately, in July of 2011

NASA launched the Atlantis, which would become the last shuttle to be launched into space.

With this end of NASA sending up shuttles their focused has shifted to sending robots to far

away planets to explore them. I think that NASA should have kept sending people into space but

I am happy that they are at least still exploring Space.

Works Cited

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. "A Brief History of Space

Exploration." Aerospace. N.p., n.d. Web. 31 Mar. 2017.

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http://www.aerospace.org/education/stem-outreach/space-primer/a-brief-history-of-space-

exploration/

"Space Exploration." National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives

and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 04 Apr. 2017.

https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/space-timeline.html