NASA’s Projects that Made History

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has conducted many manned and unmanned spaceflight programmes throughout its history. The one project of NASA which achieved great heights was Apollo 11 that landed a man on the Moon and returned him safely back to the Earth.

Here is the list of three successful projects of NASA which were great leaps for mankind.    

Project Mercury

Image source: www.spacefacts.de

Project Mercury was the United States first ‘man-in-space’ programme. It started in 1959 when the race to space began – to get a person into the Earth’s orbit as soon as possible. When NASA was created that same year, the US Air Force programme was transferred to it and renamed Project Mercury. Even the first seven astronauts for the project were selected among the candidates from the Navy, Air Force and Marines test pilot programmes. NASA learnt a lot through this project; they learnt how people could live and work in space; they learnt how to fly a spacecraft. These lessons helped them in later space projects. On 5 May 1961, NASA sent astronaut Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7 to become the first American in space. On the other hand, John Glenn aboard Friendship 7 was the first American to be launched into orbit.

Project Gemini

Image source: www.wikimedia.org

Project Gemini was NASA’s second human spaceflight programme. NASA had to learn what happens when people spend more time in space. It had to learn how astronauts could go outside a spacecraft in a spacesuit and how to connect two spacecraft in space. The main goals of Project Gemini were to test an astronaut’s ability to fly long-duration missions and to understand how spacecraft dock in orbit around the Earth and the Moon, perfect landing and the effects of longer spaceflights on astronauts. Before Project Gemini, NASA had not performed any of these experiments, so Gemini proved that NASA could do them all.  

Project Apollo

Image source: www.wikimedia.org

Project Apollo was the third human spaceflight programme carried out by NASA, which accomplished the landing of the first human on the Moon. The Apollo mission was like one giant leap for mankind. The main goal of this mission was to land Americans on the Moon and return them safely back to the Earth. The Apollo programme was important because in 1961 President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade. It was for the first time that human beings left the Earth’s orbit. The project’s main success came in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon as part of Apollo 11. After Apollo 11, six more spaceflights went to the Moon.

Also Read: Things you did not know about NASA

Tejal Mistry