Space Exploration: The Cold War And The Space Race

Space, the next frontier between us humans and the great unknown. As humans, we’ve always had a deep fascination with space, from the early days of the Greek philosophers who theorized what could be out there, to modern day efforts involving organizations such as N.A.S.A. and the E.S.A. However, since the 1960’s, back in the era of the Cold War and the Space Race, there has been a falling out on support for space exploration. Multitudes of space-exploration based organizations have received budget-cuts from their supporting governments along with reduced donations from public figures. Many believe that since we got a man on the moon and since we have satellites up and running in space our quest to dominate space is over, but these statements

Also, the 3 quotes I presented in the data section seemed to be all pro-space exploration as well. From my interpretation of these three sources and the various other sources I looked into, space exploration appears highly beneficial to us as humans and our understanding of Earth science and science as a whole. Space exploration satisfies the human desire to learn and “Uncover new knowledge” as Wiles states. It’s never bad to learn something new, and in the end us making exciting new discoveries as a result of space exploration might just lead to “…breakthroughs that we can’t currently imagine.”. This correlates to how new technological innovations have occurred as a result of human space exploration, leading to such inventions like the GPS and digital cameras. “The challenges to achieving ambitious exploration goals are driven largely by the need to enable reliable, safe and sustained operations of crew and machines in the harsh environment of space. These challenges require solutions that will provide benefits on Earth even before being employed in orbit” (I.S.E.C.G. 2013). Lastly, I want to discuss the possibility of resources. Our technological innovations will lead us to become more efficient at find resources and will cause less of a disruptive aftermath. In return, these resources will benefit us while causing little impact our environment! As you can see, all the points I discussed correlate to the first point, which was our quest to gain more knowledge. In our journey, we’ve only been helping humanity by providing more information to our scientific communities along with developing new technology and finding a means to achieve alternate ways of collecting resources, but with every great thing comes a few setbacks. First is the fact that since we currently know not a whole lot about space, much of the research I