historical events into a story that makes sense.

In this story, the two great powers that emerged after World War Two—the United States and

Soviet Union—competed to send communications satellites, dogs, and people into outer space…

And also to intimidate the other side with the prospect of nuclear war.

But before humans could send anything into space, first they had to get into earth's atmosphere.

[Intro Music Plays]

Folks dreamed about flying up into the heavens for centuries. You might have seen Leonardo

Da Vinci's sketches for personal flying machines, for example. But these didn't

work. Starting around CE 220 in China, people have

used unmanned sky lanterns—hot air balloons—to help messages escape the ground for everything

from military signaling to festivals.

And human hot air balloons became popular in Europe in the late 1700s, starting in France.

But these devices didn't travel fast; they couldn't handle strong winds; and they weren't

very safe. So historians tend to start the history of

air travel with two dudes from a large family, Orville and Wilbur Wright.

These bros ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Actually, let's be clear, their sister Katherine

ran the household and handled their business finances.

But the brothers wanted to build a flying machine. And at the end of the Second Industrial

Revolution—they did! Orville and Wilbur made lots of gliders, and

eventually a powered plane. They used wood and fabric, with a petrol-powered internal

combustion engine and some bicycle parts. And keep in mind, the bicycle itself was only

twenty-five years old! But first, they collected tons of data about

wing shapes and air flow using a small homemade wind tunnel.

People had tried to build flying machines, sure. But the Wrights used physical data to

design one. And then the brothers took off on the first

heavier-than-air flight on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk in the Outer Banks of North

Carolina. They made four flights on that first day. None was very long or high by modern

standards, but all were extraordinary in 1903. The Wrights wanted to commercialize their

fliers. But it took a while before people—other than the aviation-obsessed French— to believe

that they had actually flown. Eventually, however, the Wrights conducted

more demonstrations and convinced the U.S. military to invest. Aviation took off for

war, but also for mail and passenger services. With a more advanced engine, Charles Lindbergh

flew across the Atlantic in 1927. And by the early 1930s, well-off passengers could ride

commercial airlines. This revolutionized the whole tourism and cargo industries. And global

culture: it made the world feel smaller.

In terms of technical effects, air travel spawned whole industries. Think about the

many integrated technologies that allow you to fly: fuel refining, baggage processing,

ticketing, air traffic control, and so on. And, despite our angry tweets, commercial

air travel is one big, highly functioning, and safe system today.

But air IS NOT space. Flying using a jet engine in a plane with

fixed wings can get you high—into the cold, oxygen-low strata of the atmosphere. But to

escape the pull of earth's gravity, you need more power.

The solution? A really big chemical reaction. Basically: an explosion. The inspiration for

the solution? Science fiction. In 1865, French adventure writer Jules Verne

wrote a book called From the Earth to the Moon. In it, members of a gun club decide

to go the moon by creating—wait for it—a giant gun!

Verne saw American settler-colonization as a great adventure. Why not head to the moon

and exploit the Mooninites!? So science fiction matters! It influences

how we, including real-life scientists and engineers, think about what the future can

be. In this case, Verne was notable for trying to imagine a pretty dang realistic plan for

space exploration, given nineteenth-century technology.

Still, real-life giant gun-making, AKA rocket science, didn't take off immediately. Between

Verne and World War Two, the discipline of chemistry took off, especially in Germany.

Scientists had access to new materials that had simply never existed before.

So leading up to the war—and directly inspired by Verne's novel—Nazi physicist Doctor

Wernher von Braun developed chemical reactions that could propel a weapon far, far away.

And late in World War Two, the Nazis launched his V-2 rockets—the first long-range, guided

ballistic missile—against England, killing civilians.

But after the war, guess who forgave this Nazi's crimes to make use of his engineering

genius? Yup: the U S of A. Von Braun became Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center

at NASA. Like airplanes, rockets changed warfare forever.

Missiles replaced long-range bombers for delivering nuclear weapons. And thus the Cold War began:

Russians and Americans could now strike anywhere in the world. Apocalypse was only a button

away.

(By the way—this is still the case!) It's good to think about how we tell the

history of the invention of weapons. For example, one curator at the Smithsonian argued that

rockets on display there should be pointed down, so that visitors would be confronted

with destruction—rather than pointed up and away, which implies victory without consequences.

With new German-designed rockets, Soviet and American engineers competed to fly farther.

Much of the Cold War relates to this Space Race.

It began when the USSR launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. This

shocked the world and terrified many in the United States.

Only a few years later, in 1961, the Soviet Union sent the first human into space. Yuri

Gagarin made one whole orbit of earth in a Vostok spacecraft, becoming the first cosmonaut—or

“space sailor.” Like Sputnik's launch, Gagarin's flight

was utterly mind-blowing. It symbolized just how far the Soviet physical sciences had come,

very quickly. Out of an empire of serfs, the USSR had evolved into a scientific leader

capable of breaking new ground—including cultural ones.

In 1963, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova piloted Vostok 6, bringing womankind to space.

She's still alive, by the way—and has offered to take a one-way trip to Mars!

So how did the Americans respond to all this? In 1961, U.S. President John Kennedy publicly

threw down a major scientific challenge: “to land a man on the moon before the decade is

out.” Bam! Verne strikes again! The Mercury program of the early 1960s put

Americans into space. But the Apollo program successfully landed humans on the moon.

ThoughtBubble, show us the wonder of moon travel:

This program was complex, but it boiled down to a few components: Using advanced computers

to chart a course to get to the moon, crossing thousands and thousands of miles.

Training pilots to be astronauts—or “star sailors.”

Designing a command module that could land on the moon and then take off again.

And building a rocket to leave the earth with enough force to carry not a small satellite,

but astronauts, in a module. The launch vehicle that got humans to the

moon was the Saturn series, designed by Wernher von Braun's team. Like other giant liquid-fuel

rockets, it worked by mixing chemicals that would react violently, creating tremendous

force that was directed straight down, sending the vehicle up in the opposite direction.

In this case, the chemicals were liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, and “rocket propellant

one,” or RP-1. Which is basically kerosene that has a bunch of dangerous chemicals added

to make it super explosive. After several missions, and a few disasters,

NASA felt they could safely send humans to the moon and back in 1969.

So on July 16, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins took off

from Merritt Island, Florida, on the eleventh Apollo mission.

On July 20, their Eagle lander touched down in the moon's Sea of Tranquility. Neil Armstrong

became the first human to set foot on a planetary body other than earth. He was joined by Buzz

Aldrin. As young men on vacation will do, Buzz and

Neil planted the flag of the United States, took some moon-selfies, called President Nixon,

and stole some moon-rocks. Total hooligans! And then they returned to earth, four days

after landing on the moon. Thanks ThoughtBubble. There are lots of movies

about the Apollo program's numerous successes and even one of its terrifying failures, Apollo

Thirteen. Which was arguably the most successful mission, by the way, because NASA was able

to correct the disaster! And the Apollo program was as much a managerial

success as it is a technical one. It's a great example of big science—research projects

so big that no individual lab can do everything from beginning to end, so work is broken off

into chunks. Like the Manhattan Project. But not all big space science has been about

winning wars. Take the Hubble Space Telescope, Mars rover, or Cassini-Huygens satellite.

The epistemic value of these missions is incalculable. Their practical utility, almost zero.

Alas, space exploration is super expensive, and Congress has to choose how to spend taxpayers'

money. On the same day that they cancelled funding for the revolutionary physics experiment,

the Supercollider Superconductor, in 1993, they approved funding the space shuttle. This

was a big loss to particle physics, but a win for astronauts.

The shuttle program itself was retired in 2011. One response to this lack of public

funding has been an explosion of private space agencies, developing space tourism.

Another solution has been international collaboration: despite persisting political tensions, Russia

and the United States collaborate on space science today!

Perhaps most notably, since 1998, Americans, Russians, Japanese, Europeans, and Canadians

have worked together to run experiments on the International Space Station.

It's above us right now—humanity's only outpost beyond the safety of the atmosphere,

and a physical symbol of how the quest to understand our universe can bring us together.

All this space travel has given us new epistēmē—such as better understandings of the age of the

universe AKA everything. And new technē—including solar cells, freeze drying, digital cameras,

GPS, and better weather prediction. It's also given us modern communications technologies.

And, oh yeah, spy satellites.

But space science has also filled space with tons of junk, including rocket parts, dead

satellites, and human waste. Which raises the question of whose job is

it to clean up? That is, who owns space!? Well, space law generally says that no one

gets to own space. But that becomes problematic for geosynchronous

orbits, or circular paths, 35,786 kilometers above sea level, that follow the rotation

of the planet and so are fixed above specific points on earth. You can only have so many

satellites at useful geosynchronous points. The US, Russia, China, and EU already have

many of the best spots. This is another way that equatorial countries face an unequal

landscape in science. So space science raises tough questions about

power and knowledge, shared resources and competitions between nations. But there's

only one earth, and space science also provides some good models on how to share.

After all, the Apollo project was named after the Greek god of music, truth, and healing—not

war. As President Kennedy said in 1962: “…We

shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of

knowledge and understanding.” Next time—we're coming back to solid ground,

with a new perspective on earth's place in a vast universe. It's the birth of ecology

and earth systems science!

Crash Course History of Science is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula, MT and it's made

with the help of all these nice people. And our animation team is Thought Cafe.

Crash Course is a Complexly production. If you want to keep imagining the world complexly

with us, check out some of our other channels like Sexplanations, Health Care Triage, and

Mental Floss.

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Thank you to all of our patrons for making Crash Course possible with their continued support.