On July 21, 1969, the first human walked on the moon and 11 more people would follow in his footsteps on its dusty surface between 1969 and 1972, during six missions of NASA's Apollo program.
The conquest of the moon was a by-product of the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, the desire to show their technological might in the form of powerful rockets aimed at the moon hid the real message, if you are able to carry a rocket with people to the moon you are also capable of taking a rocket with thermonuclear warheads to the center of Moscow or Washington, thus maintaining the permanent threat of mutually assured annihilation.
The United States won, it reached the moon first and the priorities changed after the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 humans would not leave the earth and its low orbit again, the competition in space now materialized in the form of space stations we built the skylab , the permanently manned Russian space station MIR and finally in an international effort we would arm the international space station in orbit and China would arm several space stations on its own the latest Tiangong 3.
But the international climate is heating up again and now the goal is to get Humans to Mars, but since Mars is so far away that the shortest manned mission would take months to arrive, we need to go back to the moon first and establish a base there that will serve as a base for us. springboard to facilitate further missions to Mars and to return to the moon we need a rocket that is at least as powerful as the Saturn 5 that took us to the moon 53 years ago.
Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer and supporter of human exploration on Mars, in 1996 wrote the book Allegation to Mars where he proposed a mission to Mars with a vehicle made basically of parts of the space shuttle, its gigantic tank and 4 instead of two of its engines. solid fuel.
In the 2000s, NASA took this idea seriously and proposed the constellation program, in which various vehicles and specialized capsules would be built for different uses, from transporting humans and cargo to the international space station to returning from missions. manned to the moon and later to Mars.
I believe every country needs to work together to conquer space. Competition among superpowers is not the best approach.
That would be ideal...
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