NASA: How America won the Space Race to the moon | History Stories

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind": These historic words uttered by Neil Armstrong, as he became the first man to walk on the moon, will echo through the ages. NASA's successful moon landing on July 20th, 1969 may be the most memorable moment of the Space Race, but it was preceeded by more than a decade of intense rivalry between the United States and the USSR to conquer space. This episode of History Stories uses archival footage to trace the progress from the earliest scientific advancements in the field of space exploration, to an historic mission which combined the efforts of the former rivals and effectively ended the Space Race.

00:00 Intro: The conquest of space - competition between the USA and the USS
0:32 Kickstart of the "Space Race" - the launch of the Soviet satellite "Sputnik 1" (1958)
1:14 NASA's "Project Mercury": Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space (1961)
1:51 Historic speech by US President John F. Kennedy (1962)
2:40 "Project Gemini"
4:14 "Project Apollo" and the Apollo 11 mission
7:18 Neil Armstrong becomes the first human to walk on the moon (1969)
9:33 The "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project"

#dwhistoryandculture #nasa #coldwar #history #space

[luckyea]

A few days ago, on May 7, 2023, Dmitry Rogozin, the former head of Roskosmos, wrote that in 10 years of work in government bodies (in 2011-2018 he was Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation), he never found evidence of the presence of Americans on the moon. He did not find evidence later, when he became the head of Roskosmos (from May 2018 to July 2022).

D. Rogozin's words instantly scattered across the network. Never before has the highest echelons of government spoken out with such frankness about the lack of evidence of American flights to the moon.

“About ten years ago, when I worked in the Government, I sent an official request to Roskosmos to provide me with the documentary evidence of the stay of Americans on the moon that was at the disposal of this federal agency at that time. I was painfully embarrassed by the fact that Soviet cosmonauts returning from multi-day expeditions barely kept on their feet and underwent a long recovery after such flights, and the Americans crawled out of their lunar ships like cucumbers from a garden.

Do you know what I got in return?) The book "Conquest of the Moon by Astronauts" with the comment of cosmonaut Leonov that they really were there, because "they told him about it themselves"!

In 2018, when I went to work at the state corporation Roskosmos, I continued to search for this evidence, but I didn’t find anything there, except for the angry accusations of some of our fans of going to America at the expense of others, academicians, that I, they say, undermine the “sacred cooperation with NASA”, I also received one angry call from a high-ranking official accusing me of "aggravating the international situation" with my doubts.

Yes, I did not undermine or aggravate anything, but only by virtue of my nature I tried to get to the bottom of the details and establish, at least for myself, the true state of affairs in the issue of exploration of the Moon by our competitors. It was not clear to me how the United States, at that level of technological development of the 60s of the last century, did what they still cannot do now?

Thus, instead of proof that the Americans were on the moon, I received proof that their people were in our "establishment". Which was also an important conclusion.", he writes.

Dmitry Rogozin was not the first person in the "upper echelons of power" to publicly express doubts about the credibility of the moon landing.

The official representative of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Major General of Justice Vladimir Markin, in his column in the Izvestia newspaper, back in 2015, proposed an international investigation into the flight of US astronauts to the moon.

On June 16, 2015, in his column in the Izvestia newspaper devoted to the investigation into FIFA officials, Markin wrote:

“And you can also help to conduct an international investigation into where the film shot by astronauts on the Moon disappeared, or where 400 kg of lunar soil are hidden and no one else is shown. No, we do not at all claim that they did not fly, but only made a movie. But all these scientific or, perhaps, cultural artifacts are the property of mankind, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. And the investigation will show.

On the Internet, you can easily find sentimental stories, as in the early 2000s, they suddenly discovered that a significant part of the materials filmed by the Westinghouse "lunar television camera" of the Apollo 11 mission had disappeared somewhere. Of course, NASA initiated a massive search campaign. Searches, unfortunately, yielded nothing. More than 700 boxes of astronaut videos, audio and health data literally vanished into thin air.

Stories about how the hope to find at least one of the hundreds of missing boxes faded drop by drop are written by an experienced Hollywood screenwriter and are designed to bring tears of tenderness to the reader.

NASA announced in 2006 that the original recordings were most likely irretrievably lost. Records of other lunar expeditions also accidentally disappeared - in total from 10, 000 to 13, 000 magnetic tapes with information about the Apollo missions. NASA reported that their trail was lost sometime between 1970 and 1975.

Perhaps NASA reported missing the original lunar television reports not because they were gone, but simply because they, these originals, never existed. After all, those original reels with video recordings should have contained not only video reports from the Moon, but also audio communications, and telemetry (data from hundreds of sensors), and even records of the astronauts' health status (pulse rate, breathing rhythm, etc.). And if no one flew to the Moon, then no telemetry was recorded. Accordingly, these 13 thousand bobbins never existed.