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RAND employs a lot ofprominent scholars: mathematicians, chemists, physicists, social scientists, computer experts andothers. The most important researches carried out by RAND are connected with military tasks.A great part of Research and Development is done at the US universities, oriented towardnot only instructing undergraduates but also toward research, sponsoredmainlythroughcontract systems. At present the US universities are involved in two kinds of research.Department research is carried out by the faculty in the traditional academic pattern.
Itis supervised by a professor, assisted by graduate students and technicians. Such research is notbudgeted by outside sources and referred to “as little science”.Big science research is mainly funded by outside sources: the Federal governmentagencies, NSF, private business enterprises, different non-profit institutions and eveninternational agencies, e.g. UNESCO. Most of the research at the best private universities suchas MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Johns Hopkins University and others isdone by the grantees of above mentioned bodies .As one of the means of aiding the progress ofscience and engineering they offer three-year graduate Fellowships to the brightest graduates andstudents. Among those who have received this Fellowship are 9 Nobel Prize Winners, manymembers of the National Academy of Sciences and Space research.
A considerable part of themoney comes from the Pentagon, which remains the biggest supporter of new technologies anddevelopments. The US government also maintains its own laboratories (such as the Oak BridgeNational Laboratory, the National Research Laboratory or the Brookhaven NationalLaboratory) run by government workers but dependent on universities as a source of permanentresearch personnel. The governmental and military contracts also encourage the growth ofscience-oriented industries nearby ( e.g.
Bell Laboratories).Almost in tandem with the Atomic Age there has been running the Space Age. Americanscientist Robert Goddard was one of the first to experiment with rocket propulsion systems in the30s.. Over next 10 years the interest in rocketry increased in the US, Britain, Germany, and theSoviet Union. During the late 1940s, the US Department of Defense pursued upper atmosphericresearch as a means of assuring American leadership in this field. A major step forward camewhen President D. Eisenhower approved a plan to orbit a scientific satellite as part of theInternational Geophysical Year for 1957 to gather scientific data about the Earth.The Soviet Union quickly followed the suit, launching in October 1957 the world’s firstartificial satellite SPUTNIC 1.The space race began and in October , 1958 the Congress and thePresident created the Federal Independent Agency National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration (NASA) as “An Act to provide for research into problems of flight within andoutside the Earth’s atmosphere and for other purposes”.
NASA was headed by Famous Germanrocket specialist Werner von Braun and absorbed into itself the earlier National AdvisoryCommittee for Aeronautics and lots of other organizations. It keepsthree major researchlaboratories and some smaller test facilities (with the annual budget of 100 million dollars and8000 employees).Eventually NASA created other Centers and a number of affiliates includingthe Space Center in Huston, where the forming and training of the space crews is carried out.On April 12th, 1961 Russian cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin became the first man inspace. After returning to the earth he pronounced a well-known challenge: “Now let the othercountries try to catch us”.
Several weeks later President Kennedy appealed to Congress: “Ibelieve this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon andreturning him safely to earth”. Within very short time after that NASA began to conduct spacemissions. On May 5th, 1961 Alan B. Shepard Jr. became the first American to fly into space,and on February 20th, 1962 John H.
Glenn became the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth. Oneof the highlights of the program occurred during Gemini 4, on June 3, 1965, when Edward H.White became the first US astronaut to conduct a spacewalk.The main achievement of NASA during its early years involved the human exploration ofthe Moon Project Apollo. In 1968, after 11 years of major challenges and tragedies – notably1967 fire in an Apollo capsule , having taken the lives of three astronauts, the Apollo projectunder the auspices of the NASA was under way. Apollo 7 carried three men around the earth,and then Apollo 8 carried three others around the moon. Apollo 9 and 10 tested the workabilityof the lunar module.
On July 16, 1969, the spacecraft Apollo 11 was ready for launching.Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin were transferred to the lunar module, the Eagle,and landed on the moon, leaving behind a plaque that read “ Here Men from Planet Earth FirstSet Foot Upon the Moon.
July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace for All Mankind”. “That’s onesmall step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, said Neil Armstrong as he first scuffed thesurface of the moon with his foot on July the 20 th .PPSince then, there have been other American flights to the moon. .Displays at the NationalAir and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. show the developments in space travel. From thescientific point of view, Apollo 15 and Apollo 16 expeditions were especially important., asthey were aimed at learning more about the origin of the moon and the universe.
During themoon expedition astronauts Scott and Irwin were able to leave the lunar Module to drivearound over more than 27 kilometers of lunar ground and bring back a chunk of truly ancientlunar crust. After Apollo 17 the exploration of space shifted from the Apollo lunar program toSkylab, the manned orbital space station.
In 1975, NASA cooperated with the Soviet Union toachieve the first international human spaceflight, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). Thetwo spacecrafts were launched within 7.5 hours, docked three hours after and .3 Americanastronauts Thomas P. Stafford, Vance Brand ,Donald Slaytor and 2 Soviet CosmonautsAlexei Leonov and Valerii Kubasov met and shook hands in orbit. After that various US spaceshuttles docked with the Mir nine times, and 52 American astronauts as well as astronauts fromEurope and Japan, visited the station for research and training.During the 1980s and the 1990s, the USA launched several spaceships to investigatedistant planets.
Pioneer X passed Jupiter; Mariner X became the first probe to fly to Venus andMercury. The Viking probes landed on Mars and provided valuable information of the planet.By the 1980s NASA had created the nation’ space transportation system of the future –the Space Shuttle, that was a reusable manned spacecraft taking off like a rocket and landinglike an airplane.After the number of successful missions of shuttle Columbia,the third inNASA’s shuttle program Discovery went into operation.Although the risks of the space flights were decreasing, and space flights have become toseem almost routine one cannot insure their absolute safety. The tragic day in the space programwas on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded soon after liftoff due tothe leak of one of two Solid Rocket Boosters.
All seven members of the crew including a womanastronaut were killed. On the First of February 2003 American Space Shuttle Columbia broke upover Texas as it descended for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida following a 16day flight. All its seven crewmembers died.
The Shuttle program was grounded for over twoyears, while NASA and its contractors worked to redesign the Boosters and increase safety andregain the momentum lost due to the Challenger disaster.In spite of the tragedies and loss of the human lives NASA has remained a leading forcein space scientific research. Since 1975 there have been a number of space expeditions to Mars,Jupiter and its moon Europa stimulating public interest in aerospace exploration. NASA’sHubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates. Usinginnovative technologies, the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars on July 4th, 1997 andexplored the surface of the planet with its miniature rover. The Mars Pathfinder mission was ascientific success, watched by many via the Internet.
This success was followed in January 2004to much scientific and popular acclaim by the landing of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers.John Mather and George Smoot’s Nobel Prize awards of 2006 marked the inception ofcosmology as a precise science and manifested the work of more than 1,000 researchers,engineers and other participants for the experimental measurements that revealed the blackbodyform of the microwave background radiation measured by satellite launched by NASA in 1989.With the end of the cold war the technical cooperation between Russian and U.S.
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