The real reason Apollo missions made countless trips out of space was because they were in competition with Russia. We wanted to get to the moon first to prove we were more worthy than the Russians, who'd scared everybody with Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite, and Yury Gagarin, the first human in orbit. Russia was achieving things out of space that the United States weren’t. President John F. Kennedy refused to keep coming in second so he helped fund extra money to NASA and insisted that they try to land a man on the moon before the decade was over. NASA didn’t want the President looking crazy making promises that he couldn’t keep to the Country so they tried their hardest to come up with the best spaceship and the best plan to get us on the moon. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space, even though he didn’t quite actually make it to the actual moon that was more than the NASA had ever traveled. On July 21st, 1969 achieved their goal of landing Americans on the moon. At 2:56 UTC, Neil Armstrong became the first astronaut ever to walk on the face of the moon. Additional flight objectives included scientific exploration by the lunar module, or LM, crew; deployment of a television camera to transmit signals to Earth; and deployment of a solar wind composition experiment, seismic experiment package and a Laser Ranging Retro reflector. During the exploration, the two astronauts were to gather samples of lunar-surface materials for return to Earth. They also were to extensively photograph the lunar terrain, the deployed scientific equipment, the LM spacecraft, and each other, both with still and motion picture cameras. This was to be the last Apollo mission to fly a "free-return" trajectory, which would enable, if necessary, a ready abort of the mission when the combined command and service module/lunar module, or CSM/LM, prepared for insertion into lunar orbit. The trajectory would happen by firing the service propulsion subsystem, or SPS, engine so as to merely circle behind the moon and emerge in a trans-Earth return trajectory The reasons we travel according to Rocketeers is so that we can explore. Humans are driven to explore the unknown, discover new worlds, push the boundaries of our scientific and technical limits, and then push further. The intangible desire to explore and challenge the boundaries of what we know and where we have been has provided benefits to our society for centuries. Curiosity and exploration are vital to the human spirit and accepting the challenge of going deeper into space will forever be the reason we travel into space. We’re still on certain missions like trying to get the first astronaut to walk on Mars so that we can explore that planet and see exactly what’s going on over there.
Nowadays and back in the 60’s they had overall the same reason for traveling but yet different goals. They both were trying to do something that’s never been done before out of space, making history was the goal. But private companies that are traveling to space in this day of time are more secretive with their travels. Not wanting the citizens of the United States to know exactly what’s going on until they actually find something. And they’re looking past just making it to the moon. They want to see everything that’s out there and maybe even change some things.
I can’t lie; before I even opened the book Rocketeers I knew this was going to be the most boring thing I ever read and that this final long paper was going to be extremely hard. Boy was I wrong, well at least about the first part. What first caught my attention was as a little boy at the age of 8 years old how fascinated he was about the moon and space travel. How he memorized every detail of a picture of a man standing on the moon to me foreshadowed a little bit on how the rest of the book would turn out. The X PRIZE was something I would’ve most likely competed in. There were only 3 rules that needed to be followed in order to compete. First, you had to build a manned spaceship without any government funding. Second, you had to launce not only yourself but also 2 other people in the spaceship to an altitude of 100 kilometers and return to earth. The last rule was that not only did you have to travel once but in another two weeks you had to do the exact same thing in the exact same ship just so they could make sure that your spacecraft can be used over and over again not just once. This was really a chance for private industry’s to step up and outdo the government. Diamandis vision was clear; he wanted a university where he could meet all of the future leaders of the space programs and forge a common vision of space. To me Brian Feeney was about as average as a human being can possibly be. He started off with a dream, kind of lost sight on his goals, got married at an young age, got divorced, traveled to get away from his troubles, partied and partied and partied, then realized his mistakes, came back to his senses, got his life back on track and start finding ways to make even money. I really admired how he decided to come back to Toronto to be with his daughters. Feenney started a group called The da Vinci Project which seemed to have all the right members to win the X PRIZE. Its included himself, Brian Feeney, Lorne Brandt, a forty-one-year-old physics teacher who had been volunteering for the project off and on for a couple of year and a magazine writer and photographer pair from Germany. He never forced nor made anyone do anything dealing with the project. He wanted everyone to take pride in their contribution to the da Vinci Project no matter how small it was. Sadly in the 1800’s the recession hit and Feeney went completely broke. He lost everything including his Porsche, Mercedes 300 and even his house. Overall throughout the book I noticed that the X PRIZE was really a scheme. Let’s offer up a bunch of money that we don’t even have yet to anybody who can come up with their own spaceship without government help. Then once we see whose spaceship works the best that’s when we take over and demand you make more while we send our people to space. Yeah of course you’ll get the credit that hey, that’s my spaceship that I built that’s going to the moon but in all honesty it just wasn’t that worth it to me. Then offering a humongous prize like 10 million dollars Peter Diamandis knew that participate in the competition. President George W. Bush new mission for NASA that he announced to the world saying “To send people back to the moon before 2020 and from there on to Mars” only made things one hundred times worse. That was one of the two events in 2004 that led NASA to seriously considering working with space entrepreneurs. The other event was how well Scaled’s success with SpaceShipOne which was the winner of X PRIZE. Nobody wanted to let the President of The United States down and meet his goals, it actually caused a lot of pressure to certain individuals. The only person to me who actually had any sense and was actually using his brain was James Oberstar, a Democrat from Minnesota. He and I were on the same page actually wondering why would the government not step in on this competition and see that you got people conducting in dangerous experiments that could possibly lead to death. “We don’t allow that in the laboratories of Food and Drug Administration or the National Cancer Institute; why should we allow it with space travel. It became obvious that this whole travel to the moon thing was really commercial and was for publicity. They weren’t trying to visit the moon just because, its only been done once. They wanted way more than that. They wanted taking trips to be an annually thing for the United States.