A Place Other Than Earth

Essay by bravesbaseball1984High School, 11th gradeA+, April 2004

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The landing on the moon ended a thirteen year competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. In October nineteen fifty-seven, the Soviet Union had created the first artificial earth satellite, named Sputnik. This began the race for space. As early as the nineteen twenties, scientists and engineers from all over the world, such as the Russian Constantin Ziolokovsky, the German Hermann Oberth, the American Robert Goddard, and the Frenchman Robert Esnault-Pelterie, for the most part jealous of one another's work, but had figured out many theoretical and mathematical foundations, by means of high-powered rockets (Chaikin 201).

Small groups and organizations were forming during the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. A few were the German "Society for Space Travel", The Britain Interplanetary Society, and the American Rocket Society. They were made to perform experiments with rockets and discuss space exploration, but unfortunately none of these programs had enough funds to conduct the experiments necessary to figure out the mysteries of space. At the end of the nineteen thirties, in most countries the research and experimenting of space was at a standstill. Germany was the only country to continue research because the military in the country was interested in the possibility of using rockets and had established a rocket research group in the Army Weapons Office, in nineteen thirty-two. Under the command of Colonel Walter Dornberger, a German...