First Landing on the Moon

Thesis statement

The July 1969 moon landing was the biggest scientific achievement of the 20th century whose purpose was to show political supremacy over USSR during the cold war.

Outline

On 16 July 1969, half a million people gathered near Cape Canaveral (then Cape Kennedy), Florida. Their attention was centered on three astronauts—Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., and Michael Collins—who hive away the couches of an Apollo spacecraft bolted atop a Saturn V launch vehicle, awaiting ignition of five clustered rocket engines to boost them towards the first lunar landing (Cappellari, pp. 87). This event took place eight years after President John F. Kennedy, in the wake of Soviet Sputnik and Vostok successes which emerged a challenge to land men on the before 1970 and thus give the United States distinction in space exploration. After twenty manned missions—two to the vicinity of the moon. The July 1969 moon landing considered as the biggest scientific achievement of the 20th century whose purpose was to show political supremacy over USSR during the cold war.



The dream of visiting the moon was already centuries old when the World War II ended in 1945. Robert Goddard (1882-1945) had inspired and dreamed to travel moon. That is reason he built and flew the first advanced rockets during the 1930s in the New Mexico desert, and strongly attracted Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), leader of a squad that contributed Nazi Germany the world's first guided missiles in 1944-45. Postwar Soviet and American leaders, distinguishing the military potential of such missiles, clamored for bigger, more powerful editions. The competition between nations to have the most powerful weapons started. Nations had produced rockets strong enough to carry a nuclear bomb halfway around the world or a small satellite into Earth orbit by 1957. The Soviet Union demonstrated and launched such a satellite, Sputnik I, in October 1957. The success of Sputnik opened the Space Age and added a new dimension to the superpowers' already intense rivalry.

Soviet accomplishments in space dominated American ones from 1957 through April 1961, when Major Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) of the Red Air Force turned the first man to orbit Earth. America's apparently permanent second place position in space stung the pride and countermined the Cold War policies of foreign the newly inaugurated president, John F. Kennedy. He aimed, in a May 1961 address to Congress, that the United States takes a bold step: devoting it to landing a man on the Moon and bringing back him safely to Earth by the end of the decade (John, pp 4).

The organizational and engineering disputes demanded in coping with Kennedy's goal were huge. Project Apollo would demand flights a half-million miles long, and it took two weeks to reach its destination (Aldrin, pp 34).

Discussion

In the mid-fifties, progress in liquid-fuel rockets was evident. Americans and Russians were secretly competing to get more powerful and reliable in space race. Soviet side, the Korolev fervently supported in their desire to be the first to place an artificial satellite ...