Aitam

Work on the creation of space manned stations began in the U.S. and the U.S.S.S.R. almost simultaneously - in the early 1960s. But since the Americans later focused on the prestigious Apollo program, the extensive program of space exploration in addition to Apollo left them with only the Skylab orbital station, launched on May 14, 1973 and the Space Shuttle, which is now the only operational manned spacecraft of the United States. The space station (SC) orbital block was built on the basis of the S-4B rocket, the third stage of the Saturn 5 launch vehicle, which once took a man to the Moon...

In accordance with the Apollo program, nine expeditions were sent to the Moon between 1969 and 1972. Six of them ended with twelve astronauts landing on the Moon's surface from the Bourgeois Ocean in the west to the Taurus Ridge in the east. The tasks of the first two expeditions were limited to flights in selenocentric orbits, and the landing of astronauts on the Moon on one of the expeditions was cancelled due to the explosion of the oxygen tank for fuel cells and the life support system, which took place two days after the launch...

Within a short period of time since the beginning of the space age, man not only sent automatic space stations to other planets and set foot on the surface of the Moon, but also revolutionized space science, which has not been equal in human history. Along with the great technological advances brought about by the development of cosmonautics, new knowledge about planet Earth and the surrounding worlds has been acquired. One of the first important discoveries made by a method other than the traditional...

It was only a few years after the space age that man first assessed the role of satellites in monitoring agricultural land, forests and other natural resources on Earth. The beginning was in 1960, when the meteorological satellites Tiros were used to obtain a map of the shape of the globe lying under the clouds. These first black-and-white TV images gave very little insight into human activity, and yet this was the first step. New techniques were soon developed to improve the quality of observations...

After the launches of the Soviet and American satellites the issue of practical use of the developed equipment came up. The capabilities of the equipment and the satellites themselves attracted the attention of meteorologists in terms of obtaining regular information about the constantly changing weather on a global scale. The first attempt in this direction was made by the Americans, who created a family of meteorological satellites "Tiros". Nine such satellites were put into orbit in 1960-1965...

Voices from space Television (TV) programmes no longer mention that the programme is transmitted via satellite. This is further evidence of the tremendous success in industrializing space, which has become an integral part of our lives. Communication satellites are literally entangling the world with invisible threads. The idea of communication satellites was born soon after the Second World War, when A. Clarke in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World magazine presented his concept of a repeater communication station located at an altitude of 35880 km above the Earth...

On April 12, 1961, at 9:07 Moscow time, several tens of kilometers north of the village of Tyuratam in Kazakhstan, at the Soviet Baikonur Cosmodrome, an intercontinental ballistic missile R-7 was launched, in the bow of which was located a manned spacecraft "Vostok" with Air Force Major Yuri Gagarin on board. The launch was successful. The spacecraft was launched into orbit with an inclination of 65 grams, perigee height of 181 km and apogee height of 327 km and made one round around the Earth in 89 minutes...

The beginning of the space age On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched the world's first artificial Earth satellite. The first Soviet satellite made it possible to measure the upper atmosphere density for the first time, to obtain data on the propagation of radio signals in the ionosphere, to work out the issues of launching into orbit, thermal regime, etc. The satellite was an aluminum sphere with a diameter of 58 cm and weight of 83.6 kg with four pin antennas 2.4-2.9 m long. The initial parameters of the orbit were: perigee height 228 km, apogee height 947 km, inclination 65...

The spacecraft of the future NASA (National Aeronautics Administration of the United States) plans to create a fundamentally new spacecraft, which will not, like a shuttle, drop fuel tanks at the start...

Beyond the visible The human eye does not see everything - for example, we cannot see the radiation that, along with the light rays, emit stars and other cosmic bodies: X-rays and gamma rays, micro - and radio waves...

Black Hole Scientists have recently discovered that a giant black hole may be in the middle of our galaxy. Black holes are invisible space objects of very high density, formed after the explosion of large stars...

To Saturn While flying past Saturn, two Voyager probes took amazing pictures. "Voyager, who visited Saturn in 1979-1980, managed to get amazing information that amazed scientists. It turned out that on...