I will never forget sitting in my living room as Armstrong stepped off the Lunar Excursion Module onto the lunar surface. The Apollo 11 Moon landing happened in July 1969. This mission gave us “ Earthrise”, the first look at our home planet as seen from afar. astronaut or Soviet cosmonaut, had left low Earth orbit. It was the first time that anyone, whether U.S. In December 1968, when I was in eighth grade, I watched the Apollo 8 mission orbit the Earth on TV. On to the Moon ‘Earthrise,’ captured by the Apollo 8 mission, was the first look at Earth from afar. The technology of this maneuver, used in Apollo missions, would later help land Neil Armstrong on the Moon. The central feature of the lunar orbit rendezvous was that two spacecraft, the Apollo Command Module and the Lunar Excursion Module, would rendezvous in orbit around the Moon using the same technique the Gemini 6 and 7 missions had demonstrated. There, under “Spaceflight,” was a full-page diagram of the lunar orbit rendezvous plan that a NASA engineer, John Houbolt, had developed to get the astronauts to the Moon and back. Wein directed me to the “S” volume of the World Book Encyclopedia. At the time, I didn’t understand the importance of this mission, until Mrs. The Gemini 6A and 7 spacecrafts practiced a rendezvous maneuver in Earth’s orbit. A lunar orbit rendezvous occurs when a smaller lunar lander breaks off a main spacecraft while in orbit to land on or circle the Moon before returning to the main craft. Orbital maneuvers like this require very precise calculations and a spacecraft in which astronauts can make path changes in orbit – which is what the Gemini capsule was designed to do. This was the first time that two piloted spacecraft performed what is called a rendezvous maneuver, where they meet up in orbit. Wein gave me permission to stay home from school to watch the TV coverage. In December, NASA launched the joint missions of Gemini 6 and 7, and Mrs. In 1965, NASA planned to launch the two-person Gemini spacecraft, and I moved on to the fifth grade where my teacher, Mrs. Next, NASA was ready to move on to a more maneuverable two-person spacecraft. The program proved that NASA could put a manned spacecraft in orbit and bring it back safely to Earth. There would be three more missions in the one-manned Mercury program, culminating in Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 mission, which completed 22 Earth orbits. This image, taken in the Gemini 6 craft, shows the Gemini 7 craft just 43 feet away. During the Gemini mission, two spacecrafts attempted the first-ever space rendezvous. mission to send a man into orbit around the Earth. My class then sat and listened to the historic launch of Friendship 7 carrying Glenn, which was the first U.S. She demonstrated this by moving the pen cap around the globe. When the rocket got high enough, Glenn in the Mercury capsule – the cap – would separate from the rocket and go into orbit around the Earth. None of us did, so she grabbed a globe, and using a pen with a plastic cap, she demonstrated that John Glenn, an astronaut, would soon be launched on a rocket – the pen – from Florida. She asked if any of us knew what those words meant. She went to the blackboard and wrote in large block letters “John Glenn” and “NASA.” Ochs, told the class that we would be doing something different on that day. From John Glenn’s first flight into orbit to the Hubble telescope, the agency’s legacy has inspired generations of scientists. I’ve now been a professor of physics and astronomy for nearly 30 years, and I realize that, like countless others who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, NASA’s missions have had a profound effect on my life and career path. Sixty-five years ago, in 1958, several government programs that had been pursuing spaceflight combined to form NASA.
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