NASA has begun the process of shutting down its American spaceflight programme – which ends the ambitious plan to put man back on the moon. This is largely down to the budget cuts that president Barack Obama needs to make, in an effort to sort out America’s deep economic problems. The recent catastrophic oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico could also have played a role in this final decision.
America’s adventure with NASA and space stretches back half a century, to the days of ‘The Space Race,’ and the famous battle with the USSR during the dark days of the Cold War. Initially, it was the Eastern land that was winning the duel, with Sputnik becoming the first spacecraft to enter space, and then Yuri Gagarin became the first man into space in April 1961. The US were slow off the mark, John Glenn achieved their feat of humans in space, almost a full year later. On May 25th 1961, John F. Kennedy announced the groundbreaking plan, that the United States would have the goal of reaching of Moon by the end of the decade.
On the 20th July 1969, JFK’s mission came true, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first two men to land on the moon – ‘There’s One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind.’ On landing, Armstrong and Aldrin planted an American flag on the moon’s surface, as a significant propaganda coup. With the moon landing successful, America’s next mission was to launch the first reusable spacecraft into space. The Space Shuttle was exactly what the country needed and on April 12th 1981, the US launched the Columbia Space Shuttle. Five years later, tragedy struck the American space programme, when Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff in January 1986, killing all seven crew members onboard, including the first citizen onboard, Christa McAuliffe.
As the Cold War ended, so did the ‘Space Race,’ as America and Russia started working together on a variation of space projects, including Mir and the Hubble Space Telescope. More disaster followed in February 2003, when Columbia broke up on entry to landing in Texas, once again killing all seven crew members. Now, with news that President Obama announces plans to cancel additional funding of the US Moon programme to return US astronauts to the Moon by March 2020, it is another blow for NASA, as the Space Shuttle programme is also being wound down very soon. Certainly, the human space programme era, which has seen a lot of colourful history might well now be coming to a swift and anticlimactic ending.
