Space was explored as early as
the fourth century BCE, through ancient astronomy. It was only in
the twentieth-century that man sent out probes and himself to explore space.
Space exploration, then, can be broken into three conclusive categories:
astronomy, unmanned probes, and manned probes. The sub-page branches
listed below represent these three fields of space exploration.
Although seemingly contrary to the divisions just drawn, man is the explorer
in all of these sub-pages; it is man's dream, technology, and understanding
of science that forms the basis of all forms of space exploration.
The exploration of space is value based, that is, man has "reason" to send
men to the moon and to study distant galaxies, just to name a couples such
values. (For a more complete exploration of man's "reason," see Issues
on Space Exploration: Why we explore space.) From ancient times,
to well into to the twentieth-century, the only technologically feasible
method to explore space was astronomy--the studying of the millions of stars
and neighboring planets, which invade night sky, as they have done
for billions of years. The mysterious movements of the planets and
the ebbing of stars across the sky had originally found explanations in
religion, but as man's understanding of the science of astronomy increased
natural laws, and not dogma, took form. And, as a solid foundation
was laid with ground-based astronomy, man walked resolutely into the Space
Age, upon the advent of the modern rocket. Given this stepping stone
of the liquid fueled rocket (see How Rockets Work),
man was able to enter the cosmic "ocean." Public support for the
space program, during the Cold War era, allocated millions of dollars to
the exploration of space, but this trend has ceased in the later part of
the twentieth-century. The peak of space exploration, as a function
of government and public support, apexes in the 1970's, with the Apollo
program. The public has generally been more supportive
of the manned exploration program, but the costs and the values at risk
are malignant
to the support of space exploration as a whole. Today, economic resources
for space exploration are scarce and public, and thus government support
is relatively low. The glorious Apollo missions are impossible to
reconstruct, and instead there has been a steady trend towards unmanned
space exploration. What the future of space exploration will hold
is highly dependant on the rising generation, and the values they hold towards
space exploration. |
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