Первые шаги в космос: проекты "Меркурий" и "Джемини".

First Steps into Space: Projects Mercury and Gemini

Introduction

Humanity has dreamed of traveling into space for centuries, but in the twentieth century, scientific and technical capabilities converged with this dream for the first time. From the work of Robert H. Goddard through the heroic era of spaceflight into the 1960s, the modern age of rocketry signaled a beginning that would eventually lead to human flights beyond Earth to the Moon. All of these enthusiasts believed humanity would soon explore and eventually colonize the solar system. And many of them worked relentlessly to make that belief a reality. They successfully convinced a large majority of Americans of spaceflight’s possibility. Through their constant public relations efforts during the decade following World War II, they engineered a sea change in perceptions, as most Americans went from skepticism about the probabilities of spaceflight to an acceptance of it as a near-term reality.

This is apparent in the public opinion polls of the era. In December 1949, Gallup pollsters found that only 15 percent of Americans believed humans would reach the Moon within 50 years, while 15 percent had no opinion, and a whopping 70 percent believed that it would not happen within that time. In October 1957, at the same time as the launching of Sputnik I, only 25 percent believed that it would take longer than 25 years for humanity to reach the Moon, while 41 percent believed firmly that it would happen within 25 years, and 34 percent were not sure. An important shift in perceptions had taken place, and it was largely the result of well-known advances in rocket technology coupled with a public relations campaign that emphasized the real possibilities of spaceflight.

Indeed, by the end of World War II, all the technical assessments suggested that it was only a matter of a few years before the United States would be able to place a satellite in orbit around Earth and, ultimately, to place a human in a capsule for orbital activities. In 1946, for instance, the forerunner of the Rand Corporation completed an engineering analysis of an Earth satellite vehicle for the Army Air Forces, finding important military support functions possible ranging from weather forecasting to secure global communications to strategic reconnaissance. Later, military analysts thought there might be a role for piloted military missions in space, and that, along with the exploration imperative, drove efforts to make human spaceflight a reality. By the middle part of the 1950s, the spaceflight advocacy community was actively advocating, as later ensconced in the NASA long-range plan of 1959, “the manned exploration of the Moon and nearby planets.” They called for the “first launching in a program leading to manned circumlunar flight and to a permanent near-Earth space station” that would make a human mission to the Moon possible.