After the new century, NASA Director Michael Griffin once admitted that spacecraft and space stations were costly "strategic mistakes."
This is a small step for a person, but a big step for mankind.
At 2:56 am on July 21, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong put his left foot on the surface of the moon for the first time and said this.
At this moment, more than 530 million people around the world are watching this exciting moment through live broadcast.
Just half a century ago, the magician George Mélière still described in his [Moon Journey] the fantastic ideas of people going to the moon and meeting lunar men.
At this moment, although he did not meet the moon man, the unbelievable whims of Mélière had obviously become a reality.
[Burst Drummer] and Damien Chazele, the director of [City of Philharmonic], filmed [First Person on the Moon], and did not forget his bursting agility and romance.
Neil Armstrong is not a myth, nor is he a superior hero, he is a father who brought the bond with his daughter to the moon.
As a father, as a husband, as a colleague, and as an ordinary person, he talked about landing on the moon from a very personal perspective.
Although deliberately obscured the background of the time, the crazy space race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s will always be the background that mankind cannot avoid when landing on the moon.
On the second Monday of April 1961, rumors from Moscow began to spread to the international community:
Soviet rocket researchers have sent the manned aircraft into space and returned safely.
It was not until the next night that the CIA reported that the Soviet flight plan would be carried out that night.
When Washington was still asleep, on the other side of Moscow, he has been named Yuri Gagarin astronaut into space.
He set sail from the Baikonur launch site on the Vostok-1 spacecraft and circled the earth on an orbit with a maximum altitude of 301 kilometers, which lasted 1 hour and 48 minutes.
Gagarin became the first terrestrial person in the world to enter space. This man is a Soviet.
American popularity is broken.
At that time, the U.S. President Kennedy had a terrible afternoon, and all the media asked him one of the most acute questions:
Why is the United States always behind the Soviet Union in the field of spaceflight?
He also understands that if you want to wash away this stigma, you must take the lead in more radical areas, such as landing on the moon.
Therefore, there was also the famous "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech later by Kennedy . He said:
We choose to land on the moon in this era and have to do other things, not because they are simple, but because they are difficult.
Kennedy set a goal for the entire United States and NASA to send people to the moon within ten years.
Going back to the source, as early as when the United States and the Soviet Union divided up post-war Germany after World War II, this space race had already begun.
At that time, Nazi Germany had a V-2 rocket, the world's most advanced weapon, and it was also the first device that mankind created capable of entering space.
The United States was one step faster than the Soviet Union, got it first, and also reaped its creator von Braun .
Von Braun and the entire core team and core equipment behind them were all shipped to the United States.
This has also become the starting point of American aerospace technology.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union, which lost in the grabbing battle, had to hire out its own "great god", Korolev , who was imprisoned during the Soviet purge .
The rivalry between the two sides began.
In the second half of the 1950s, the two sides rushed to launch artificial satellites first, and after success, they began to send creatures such as puppies and orangutans into space.
In 57, the Soviet Union launched its first artificial satellite; in 59, the Soviet Union took the first photo of the back of the moon; in 61, Gagarin became the first human on earth to enter space.
In particular, Gagarin's heaven has deeply affected the pride of the American leader.
The American people are now watching the Soviet Union show off its power.
They needed to fight back, and Kennedy did this. Whether the final result is glory or loss, it all stems from his decision:
The United States will send people to the moon within ten years.
At that time, the American manned spacecraft had just completed a ballistic flight, and Khrushchev mocked it as a "flea jump."
The Soviet Union absolutely did not believe at the time that the United States would really devote its national efforts to the moon landing program called "Apollo".
But in fact, even if it spends more than tens of billions of dollars, the United States is determined to do it.
Because the space race has developed here, it's not just about technological superiority anymore.
In other words, it has nothing to do with national security and scientific research, but only about face. Some people even call it "celestial politics."
In the 1960s, the Soviet Union had larger rockets, but this just proved that they were technically at a disadvantage.
American scientists have found a better way to design a hydrogen warhead so that its volume and weight can be smaller than before.
Soviet scientists needed a large number of rocket boosters, but the United States did not need to be able to complete rocket launches.
People in the White House and Kremlin know this well, but ordinary people do not.
You have to explain to them that more satellites in orbit are American. Compared with the bulky satellites launched by the Soviet Union, the United States already has a complete set of satellite equipment for meteorology and communications.
For ordinary people, it's just a waste of words.
Because the Soviet Union is indeed more eye-catching, they have seized a series of "firsts" and "firsts."
The United States had long announced to the public that it would send the first American into space in early May 1961.
When the time announced by the United States is stuck, Kremlin’s Kremlin’s Khrushchev and the Soviet Union’s chief designer of manned spaceflight Korolev intend to "cut the beast."
The original 8 test shots were hurriedly launched after 7 of them, and 2 of them ended in failure.
In a hurry, everything on the spaceship Gagarin was riding on was kept simple, not even the necessary gyroscope.
The journey back was dangerous, with this failure and that interruption, and finally Gagarin, who parachuted to the ground, couldn't believe that he had returned to Earth alive.
Kennedy was forced to an end.
Some people have even begun to predict "Wait, Kennedy will lose in the next election."
He himself believes that at this moment, the eyes of the whole world are watching the competition between these two superpowers.
Theodore Sorenson was a former assistant to Kennedy. In a later biography of Kennedy of the same name, he wrote:
Kennedy believes that the United States has not fully grasped the global political and psychological impact of the space race. The East and the West are competing, trying to persuade the uncertain emerging countries to turn to their own camp and tell them the way forward.
He feared that the Soviet Union's "seeming" high-gloss achievements in aerospace would help it establish world leadership.
At this point, his heart is hairy.
Fortunately, after three weeks, the American people recovered a little psychologically—
The first "Mercury Project" carrier rocket was launched, and the passenger was Lieutenant Colonel Alan Shepard.
He flew in outer space for 15 minutes. If Gagarin's orbital complexity is 10, then Shepard's is 1 or 2.
But no one cares about this, and the United States is in joy.
New York greeted his return with the grandest ribbon ceremony in history. People sent greeting cards to him, which caused the cards to be out of stock. Lawmakers in his home state were arguing about changing the state's name to "Space City"...
When a few years later, Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon, and the astronauts saluted the flag one after another.
This face-saving and most expensive technological war in history also reached its climax.
A few years ago, the US "Newsweek" published an article detailing a crazy idea of the US military in the declassified document.
The article stated that in the late 1950s, the US military spent a lot of time exploring the possibility of using the moon for war.
The Army proposed a plan to establish a lunar base, and the Air Force went further. It wanted to attack the moon with nuclear weapons.
However, rather than attacking the moon, it is better to detonate nuclear weapons near or on the moon to deter the Soviets.
In the most frenetic era of the space race, the craziest ideas that sounded now seemed commonplace at the time.
After all, reality can always be crazier than imagination.
In 1967, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Communist Revolution, how did they celebrate? They planned to send an astronaut to the sky, dock with the spacecraft, exchange ships, and return home.
It sounds very good, but in fact, the first spacecraft "Soyuz One" is a pile of rubbish, and there is no real condition for realizing it at all.
Helpless leader Brezhnev at the time made it clear that he hoped that this would happen.
Under pressure, all those who raised questions were fired and demoted. Everything moved forward as usual. Everyone knew that this was a suicide mission.
Astronaut Komarov finally had to bite the bullet—he wanted to protect his only substitute, his best friend Gagarin.
But soon after, Gagarin was also killed in a plane crash during a flight training.
In the same year, three American astronauts on the other side, Gas Gleason, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, died in a fire in the Apollo capsule.
This somewhat reckless experiment is also relatively complete in [First Man on the Moon].
The other is the high cost. The United States invested more than 56 billion U.S. dollars in the Apollo 11 project that sent people to the moon .
And this is far from over.
Therefore, the subsequent administrations were unable to adopt long-term measures and strategies to deal with the more vigorous ethnic riots in the 1960s.
These riots, combined with the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, constituted another theme in the 1960s besides space.
After the new century, NASA Director Michael Griffin once admitted that spacecraft and space stations were costly "strategic mistakes."
There are also Nobel Prize winners in physics questioning whether the manned space program really has enough scientific value.
But as Kennedy said in his "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech:
Why choose moon landing? Then they might ask why we want to climb the highest mountain? Why fly over the Atlantic 35 years ago?
It was indeed a tit-for-tat competition and costly, but that era was also exuding a kind of eternal and infinite fantasy and perseverance.
At least, when Armstrong made his first foot on the moon, it was a romantic and wonderful moment!
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Author/curl
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Pocier"
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