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History of Technology 2: Humans in Space 22 Views
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Description:
What's the biggest takeaway from our race to get into space? Easy: the U.S.A. > Russia. 'Merica! 'Merica!
Transcript
- 00:00
getting humans into space wasn't rocket science.
- 00:05
okay it wasn't just rocket science. a bunch of other factors came [equations on a white board]
- 00:09
into play to make human space travel happen. the whole idea of space travel
- 00:13
became tangled up with the Cold War which was a global conflict between the
- 00:18
United States and the Soviet Union. for lots of complicated reasons the old USSR
Full Transcript
- 00:23
and the US were political and ideological enemies from the 1950s through the 1990s.
- 00:29
all that yeah. well the two countries made a habit of bickering and one-upping
- 00:34
each other for several decades. it was communism this and capitalism that 24 by
- 00:40
7 .what's important here is that the Cold War was one of the reasons space travel [president on the phone]
- 00:44
became a thing in the first place. in 1957 both the US and the USSR announced
- 00:49
that they were going to launch satellites that would orbit the Earth
- 00:51
and collect scientific data. basically spying on each other. suddenly getting to
- 00:57
the moon wasn't just a fun maybe one day sort of thing. it was a race. and the
- 01:02
Soviet Union was totally handing it to the US right out of the gate. by October [men in lab coats]
- 01:07
1957 the USSR had launched Sputnik 1 the first man-made object to orbit the earth.
- 01:13
a month later they launched the first live creature into space on the Sputnik
- 01:18
2 like a stray dog from the streets of Moscow and now her treatment wasn't fun
- 01:24
and nor was her eventual end. Sputnik 2 was not designed to be retrievable. no
- 01:31
we're not gonna focus on that poor dog. well all this Sputnik action had
- 01:35
Americans freaking out. the good ol US of A couldn't seriously lose to the
- 01:39
Russkies right ?right? well by 1961 their Soviets were still winning/ they put the [map of U.S. and USSR shown]
- 01:45
first man in orbit a fella named Yuri Gagarin/ well then they put the first
- 01:50
woman in space valentina Tereshkova. what a way to shatter the glass ceiling there
- 01:55
guys. no doubt the u.s. definitely needed to step up its game .so President John F
- 02:00
Kennedy announced to the world this nation should commit itself to achieving
- 02:05
the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning
- 02:10
him safely to the earth. well that was a nutty thing to say because the US had [crew helping with trip to the moon waves hands]
- 02:15
put an object in space for a grand total of 60 minutes at that point.
- 02:20
oh sure John we'll just pop on over to the moon there hit control off the
- 02:24
leader. but Americans loved it so the political pressure to figure out space
- 02:28
travel went off the charts. it turns out that Russian technological research and
- 02:32
pressuring scientists it's a really really bad idea. in the insane rush to
- 02:37
get to the moon both America and the Soviet Union ended up with accidental
- 02:41
deaths all over the place. in the u.s. three astronauts died in a fire while [headlines shown]
- 02:45
testing out the Apollo one. in the Soviet Union another astronauts parachute
- 02:50
failed while he was aborting a failed test. both countries took it down a notch
- 02:54
but well not too many notches. there were tons of problems to be solved in both
- 02:58
countries were determined to solve them. here's a short list of the issues with
- 03:02
space travel. number 1 navigation. sounds like it wouldn't be hard to find the
- 03:07
moon and it's a pretty big thing out there and it tends to glow. but it turns
- 03:11
out there's an incredibly narrow route we have to take if we want to hit the [smiling men in lab coats]
- 03:16
moon at the right spot at the right time and at the right speed. and in the 1960s
- 03:21
there was no surie calmly guiding us to our destination. NASA had to build one of
- 03:26
the world's first computer guidance systems using pretty primitive computer
- 03:30
hardware. our microwave probably has more advanced technology than that they did.
- 03:35
well another issue was food and water. spoiler alert humans have to eat and
- 03:40
drink. engineers didn't want too much ship space taken up with food and water
- 03:45
so they designed a water recycling machine to reuse most of the water on
- 03:50
board and yes ew. and they figured out how to freeze dry food to make it [astronauts in a spaceship]
- 03:54
smaller and significantly less appetizing. then there was the issue of
- 03:59
actually surviving out in space itself. somehow people were gonna have to exit
- 04:03
their shuttle and you know walk around on the moon. but space is kind of cold. we
- 04:09
stinks. and there's no air which stinks more. so engineers and scientists
- 04:13
designed the first spacesuits. well scientists and engineers also needed to
- 04:18
figure out how to connect to spaceships. because of the way a moon landing has to
- 04:23
work there's a big ship that makes the full distance and then there's a smaller
- 04:27
shuttle that pops down to the surface of the Moon. [taxi cab drives over moon's surface]
- 04:30
that means NASA I had to figure out how to let two ships connect and lock
- 04:34
together in space. starts to sound kind of impossible right ? well apparently it
- 04:39
wasn't because on July 20th 1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and
- 04:44
Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in the Apollo 11. well Neil Armstrong got to be
- 04:49
the first human to set foot on the moon famously saying that's one small step
- 04:54
for a man one giant leap for mankind. we wonder if they played rock paper [Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear on the moon]
- 05:00
scissors to see who got to say that cool line.
- 05:05
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