1. Project: History of early space flight
Students: Calancea Andreea
Rumleanschi Iana
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

2. National College, Iaşi, Romania
The realistic proposal of spaceflight goes back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. His most famous work, Исследование
мировых пространств
реактивными приборами,
was published in 1903,but was
not widely influential outside
of Russia.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

3. National College, Iaşi, Romania
Robert H. Goddard’s publication in 1919 of his paper ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes‘, where his application of the de Laval nozzle to liquid fuel rockets gave sufficient power that interplanetary travel became possible.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

4. National College, Iaşi, Romania
In 1929, the Slovene officer Hermann Noordung was the first to imagine a quite complete space station in his book 
The Problem of Space Travel.
The first rocket to reach space was a German V-2 Rocket, on
a testflight in June 1944.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

5. National College, Iaşi, Romania
Orbital space flight was first developed by the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, in a competition dubbed the Space Race which began on July 29, 1957, when the US announced at the convention of the  International Geophysical Year, Its intent to launch an artificial satellite known as Vanguard by the spring of 1958.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

6. National College, Iaşi, Romania
The Soviets reacted on July 31, announcing they would launch Sputnik 1 on October 4, After a series of Vanguard failures, the US succeeded in launching its first satellite, Explorer 1 on Feb This carried scientific instrumentation and detected the theorized Van Allen radiation belt.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

7. National College, Iaşi, Romania
In 1959, NASA began Project Mercury to launch single-man capsules into Earth orbit and chose a corps of seven astronauts introduced as the Mercury Seven.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

8. National College, Iaşi, Romania
On April 12, 1961, the USSR announced the successful launch and return of its first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin 
who made a single orbit
aboard Vostok 1. On May 5,
1961 the US launched its
first Mercury astronaut 
Alan Shepard in a capsule
he named Freedom 7, but
on a suborbital flight.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

9. National College, Iaşi, Romania
President John F. Kennedy announced on May 25 a plan to land a man on the moon by 1970, launching the three-man Apollo program. In January 1962, NASA announced a two-man spacecraft program named Project Gemini to support Apollo.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

10. National College, Iaşi, Romania
Project Mercury launched a total of six astronauts by May 16, The Soviets launched five more cosmonauts, including the first woman in space, the civilian parashutist Valentina
Tereshkova in Vostok 6 on
June 16, 1963, though this
was done for political
propaganda rather than a
commitment to women's equality.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

11. National College, Iaşi, Romania
The US succeeded in achieving President Kennedy's goal on July 20, 1969, with the landing of Apollo 11.Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the Moon. Six such successful landings were achieved through 1972, with one failure on Apollo 13.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

12. National College, Iaşi, Romania
Both the US and URSS went on to fly relatively small, non-permanent manned space laboratories Salyut and Skylab, using their Soyuz and Apollo craft as shuttles. The US launched only one Skylab, but the USSR launched a total of seven "Salyuts", three of which were secretly Almaz military manned reconnaissance stations, which carried "defensive" cannons.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

13. National College, Iaşi, Romania
In a season of detente, the two competitors declared an end to the race and shook hands (literally) on July 17, 1975 with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, where the two craft docked and the crews exchanged visits.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

14. National College, Iaşi, Romania
Although its pace slowed, space exploration continued after the end of the Space Race. The United States launched the first reusable spacecraft (Space Shuttle) on the 20th anniversary of Gagarin's flight, 12 April 1981.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

15. National College, Iaşi, Romania
Superficially, there are incredible similarities between the two craft, as seen below:
Superficially, there are incredible similarities between the two craft, as seen below:
In reality, there were many significant differences between the two craft:
- Buran utilized manned & robotic flight, the US shuttle was retrofitted for robotic flight.
- Unlike the shuttle, Buran had no main rocket engines freeing tremendous weight & space.
- Buran’s launcher, Energia, was designed to carry up to 80 metric tons into orbit on its own.
- Energa was also being designed to carry payloads to the moon without Buran.
- Buran could lift 30 metric tons of payload into orbit, vs. the shuttle’s 25 metric tons.
- The thermodynamic tiles of Buran were very different than the shuttle, and thought superior.
On 15 November 1988, the Soviet Union attempted to duplicate this with the Buran shuttle, its first and only reusable spacecraft. It was never been used again after the first flight; instead the Soviet Union continued to develop space stations using the Soyuz craft as the crew shuttle.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

16. National College, Iaşi, Romania
Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in Eileen Collins was the first female Shuttle pilot, and with Shuttle mission STS-93 in July 1999 she became the first woman to command a U.S. spacecraft.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

17. National College, Iaşi, Romania
The longest single human spaceflight is that of Valeriy Polyakov, who left earth on January 8, 1994, and didn't return until March 22, 1995 (a total of 437 days 17 hr. 58 min. 16 sec. aboard). Sergei Krikalyov has spent the most time of anyone in space, 803 days, 9 hours, and 39 seconds altogether.
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania

18. Timeline of spaceflight
Early SF Team
National College, Iaşi, Romania