How Space is Explored


   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.

Man, The Traditional Explorer
Unmanned Probes
Observatories and Other Types of Land-Based Space Exploration
 
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