Brief history of space exploration

Over the past six months, a noticeable number of first-class posts about space appeared on Habré , perhaps Zelenyikot started finding Mars-3 station on Mars, continued Kamalesh , jeston , Sulentium and @DaryaZ. Lozga summed up some , but it seems to me that all these posts are somewhat superficial and do not reflect the level that our space program has reached. That is why I gathered spirit and wrote a very long post about the true history of space exploration - I think the facts I mentioned will allow many people to take a fresh look at the very topic of space. He wrote concisely, therefore, for explanations I ask for kamenty.

There is a well-known paradox - if you are inside a spacecraft flying at almost the speed of light, time slows down for you. Such a ship needs only 25 years to reach the visible edge of the universe, although for the rest of the earth these two decades will stretch over 14 billion years.
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The same with technical progress. Progress is a shock wave, sweeping away everything in its path like a tsunami - if today a person has thought of putting on his skin, then tomorrow he will jump in a spacesuit over the moon - what’s the difference?

But inside this wave, on board “progress” it will always seem as if we are crawling like turtles. Hand on heart - who among us considers the USSR to be the best state in the world to do its entire history the impossible?

Gagarin, satellite, moon rover - beaten stamps. Like T-shirts with Che Guevara. The cosmos turned into a boring routine - now dozens of people are constantly in orbit and nobody cares about them. But the conquest of space - perhaps the most exciting journey in the history of mankind. An exciting, if you know the true story, not a propaganda picture on TV.



I think after 300 years the USSR will look like an ancient Rome or French empire under Louis - an idealistic society obsessed with the idea of ​​progress and mega construction sites, lost under the weight of its own intellect and then specified by descendants.

What is remembered in the USSR history?

In total in the twentieth century there were three mega projects: the creation of the atomic bomb, the space race and the computer revolution. We won the cosmos in pure - the American program ended with the crash of shuttles and since 2011 the “whole cosmos” has been transferred to the Russians. The Russian language is the only official language of the cosmos, it is now obliged to know anyone leaving our planet (oh, sorry for the Men in Black were shot early).

Moreover, all the space technologies in the world are now ours - I throw we sell missiles and ships fifty years ago, and we are building a new cosmodrome at Kourou, which is a complete copy of Baikonur. The earth is building its plans for the development of the outside world with an eye on Moscow.

How did the Russians manage to privatize the whole universe for themselves? This is a whole story, fascinating but confusing - get in the armchairs and wear space suits, our flight will consistently pass through five orbits.

Cosmos is the backbone of the twentieth century. Its essence and secret. For this flight will not be easy. We will look behind the scenes of history, politics, art and the world as you know it. In short, you have already understood that batthert will now be received by everyone.

First cosmic speed: space tourism



For the past forty years, reality has said no, no, and no space exploration program. It turned out that there is no economic benefit there, the flights themselves are very expensive and life-threatening, and what is going well (communication satellites, extraterrestrial astronomy) do not require people in space and are the result of electronics development, and not aeronautics. That is, the "rocket" is an ax, a primitive weapon. This is a dead-end branch of progress and there is nothing more to come up with. There is not much difference between Chinese fireworks and a rocket for a flight to the moon. This is a primitive albeit a functional tool.

Therefore, the whole ideology, all projects, the entire drive of the space extravaganza is gone. By inertia, the space theme will always be interesting, but the peak of the 50-70s is passed. All the fantastic works on this topic are written.

Only tourism remains and it can be seen throughout space fiction - the hero of space odyssey 2001 is clearly a tourist. And the heroine of the film is a stranger as if visiting the pyramids of ancient Egypt. I don’t even speak about an old track or a star landing.

There is only one snag. Remember how they did not want to let the first tourists into space? I think the point here is that all who flew into space receive a special status and join a private club, whose members do not complain about life. And then someone wants to buy a membership in it ... it’s still like some kind of fat cat decided to buy a membership in the club of those who climbed Everest. But the rules and rules to change them are the only future of space for tourism, there is nothing more to do there. But to stand on a par with Gagarin ... not many understand what it means.



Yuri Gagarin is the greatest man in history, his name will be remembered even when the others are forgotten, because this is the first man who left the earth. In order to evaluate this phrase, imagine that our civilization will perish, but the memory of one person whose name it will be may remain from it.

Here is a monument erected in honor of Columbus 600 years after his journey.



Equally magnificent buildings stand in all countries of the world. Columbus they have the main historical and epic character such as the ancient Zeus or Jesus Christ. But who is he compared to the first astronaut? But this is not the main thing. The fact is that it is impossible to jump higher than Gagarin. This is the last hero of humanity. There is nothing more significant than the first flight into space, nothing at all. Even Neil Armstrong is in the world pantheon infinitely lower than Yuri Alekseevich, despite the enormous efforts of American propaganda.

This is the meaning of space tourism, the attractiveness of space - you cannot go to the new world on the same ship with Columbus and then boldly say I was there. You can not be the first to climb Everest or reach the North Pole or sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, there is nothing exceptional in this anymore. Cosmos is so far from everything that we have seen and know that flying to the stars will probably always be a mystical event. For the flight to Gagarin do not mind any money.

But in space, money doesn't matter. That is why Roscosmos, being a space monopoly, simply spits on the possibility of earning trillions on tourism and blocks its development in the west for the same reasons as applicants for space tourists. And without Roscosmos, the very idea of ​​tourism will remain at the level of naive handicrafts of the very failed tourists.

It turns out that man in space is superfluous, but can a cold vacuum be suitable for war?

Second Cosmic Speed: SDI Program and Star Wars

Beginning with Churchill's famous Fulton speech, the Cold War began. The USA and the USSR spent half a century on the arms race. A kind of war of attrition, when both countries produced thousands of tanks, aircraft and missiles. who did not even shoot - they were simply written off as a reserve to make room for new models. And so for fifty years, until one of the players breaks.



This is a key moment in the history of space for this I will focus on it in more detail.

In Fulton, Churchill suggested that the Americans divide the world and rule in three: the United States, Britain and the USSR. America decided to be the mistress of the sea and not really calculated their strength. For such a decision, the states had an atomic bomb, a hundred aircraft carriers and a fleet of jet aircraft giving complete air supremacy. Like world domination guaranteed ...

Only now, in the Korean War of the Fifties, everything became clear - instead of a light expeditionary stroll, American troops were surprised to find the Korean MiG-15s ultra-modern jet fighters made in the USSR but with British engines. Rate the English cunning - the English units stood side by side with the Americans in South Korea, but let them shoot at them from the English weapon even with Korean hands.

Americans are hard-nosed guys, with each new round of the Cold War, they put more and more expensive toys into the ring and every time the USSR sarcastically copied and improved the presented samples. Have you built a fleet of bombers capable of reaching Moscow? Khrushchev mockingly declares that we are making intercontinental rockets like sausages. Rockets capable of hitting all cities of America faster than you refuel your aircraft.



The Americans wiped off and on June 5, 1961, they launched the Chrome Dome program - according to which strategic bombers with atomic bombs were always in the air at the borders of the USSR. However, the B-52 were not the best machines for long duty and began to fall. Under the load loaded with atomic bombs.

For seven years of the program five planes fell, the last case was the final of the program.

In 1968, a fire broke out on board one of the cars - the third pilot placed under his chair three soft foam cushions that blocked the ventilation of the heating system and ignited. The crew ejected, and the plane fell on the ice near Greenland. On board were four hydrogen bombs of one and a half megatons each — two were found, one smashed and threw seven kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium into the atmosphere, and the fourth is still being sought by treasure hunters in the rocks of Greenland.

And the Americans have scattered dozens of such bombs around the world - this is where the help for world terrorism will be. The chrome dome then had to collapse under international pressure.

But in general, this example is indicative - in the same way all their other military programs and of course the American space program developed. Not because in America bad engineers or cowardly pilots are the best in the world, this is simply not enough for super-tasks, for they need extra quality - not in the field of logic or education, but in the very basis of a national character.

By the early 1980s, a brilliant idea had matured in America to transfer the cold war from earth to space. After watching Star Wars, President Reagan announced the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its essence is terribly simple - we build a fleet of hundreds of super-powerful combat lasers that will shoot down ballistic missiles on takeoff.

By the way, the idea is very sensible, because such missiles as the SS-18 can be intercepted only on take-off, after ten minutes of flight its warhead is divided into 200 parts constantly maneuvering and avoiding interception - it is not realistic to knock them down. To lasers - a fleet of shuttles Shuttle that serve the lasers and can also carry a stock of nuclear missiles on board. In spite of the Hollywood scale, it was a swan song and the last spurt of states - which led to a complete rout.

The fact is that a feature of a socialist economy is its absolute concentration and unlimitedness. Simply put, the whole of the USSR was one firm, and its economy did not have any special restrictions, it was possible to afford any programs like building hundreds of nuclear submarines, a huge army or an ocean fleet — all without mobilization and martial law.



Let me explain by example. Under Khrushchev, they were somehow preoccupied with housing for workers and over the decade most of the country's inhabitants got their own apartments. Of course it was inferior Khrushchev, but in those days they were a luxury even for Europe. The scale is impressive - 300 million square meters of housing was built. One meter for each resident of the country.

So Khrushchev - this is a temporary housing for the workers in which they were supposed to live until 1980, when communism would come. “Temporary housing” is tin houses for migrant workers building Moscow-City skyscrapers. Now imagine the scale of these tin houses in the country of the Soviets and you can imagine the skyscraper that these workers built. With such an economy scale, the “shuttle” is one tooth. The USSR built a whole fleet of nuclear submarines and did not notice this. And one such boat costs as the average European country.



As early as 1987, the Energy booster launched the Polyus combat laser into orbit — it was immediately drowned in the ocean, so as not to escalate the conflict — the USSR then conducted propaganda under the slogan “no weapons in space”, etc. The following year, the Buran makes its only flight, and it does this in a fully automatic mode without a crew.

Unmanned mode is not just a triumph of engineering thought that is not achievable by anyone until now, but an unequivocal signal to the states. Indeed, in 1984, the Soviet laser locator "illuminated" the passing by shuttle with its guidance system - the shuttle lost contact with the ground, all electronics disconnected, and the crew "felt an acute indisposition". Those. even goal-keeping incapacitated the "space bomber", what can we say about the consequences of the combat salvo?

Suddenly it turned out that in space the Americans have nothing to catch - the USSR developed a canoe for a couple of years and could easily produce it serially, not to mention laser weapons.



In 1989, the American delegation arrived in the USSR to inspect all these achievements personally and concluded that it was time to end the cold war. In return for this, the US accepts the Fulton proposal and rejects the idea of ​​world domination. Less than 40 years!

But now, without the British colonial empire and the Soviet bloc, such a political system looks quite funny - America has 95% of military power, but it cannot even capture the Middle East. I don’t even speak about rising China and the EU. Even North Korea is wiping their feet on Americans - this is the result of the entire space race.

Third cosmic speed: how we did america

Cosmos is by and large a propaganda product. All these satellites and flights had a picture on the TV as their ultimate goal. Remember what became the symbol of television? Yes broadcast from the moon.



That's why the real symbol of television is Neil Armstrong.

The world's first artificial satellite of the earth - what could be cleaner, more romantic and elevated than this monument to humanity? To all enthusiasts, researchers, mad scientists and tireless designers who put their lives on the altar of space. But in dreams the worst thing is that they come true.

I think the world's best reaction to this event was described by Stephen King, who became a writer on October 4, 1957:

For the first time, I experienced horror — genuine horror, not a meeting with demons or ghosts living in my imagination — on one October day in 1957. I just turned ten. And, as expected, I was in the cinema - at the Stratford Theater in downtown Stratford, Connecticut.

It was one of my favorite films, and what was shown was his, and not Western Randolph Scott or John Wayne's fighter, turned out to be quite appropriate. That Sabbath day, when genuine horror struck me, there was “Earth vs. UFOs”.



And just at that moment, when in the last part of the film, the aliens were preparing to attack the Capitol, the tape stopped. The screen went blank. The cinema was packed with children, but, oddly enough, everyone behaved quietly. If you turn to the days of your youth, then remember that the crowd of kids knows how to express their annoyance in many ways, if the film is interrupted or starts late: rhythmic slamming; the great cry of a children's tribe "We want a movie! We want a movie! We want a movie! ”; candy boxes flying into the screen; pipes from packs of popcorn, but who knows what else. If someone has a flapper in his pocket from the fourth of July, he will certainly take it out, show his friends that they approve and admire, and then light it up and throw it at the ceiling.

But nothing happened on that October day. And the film did not break - just turned off the projector. And then something unheard of happened:

In the hall lit the light. We sat looking around and blinking in bright lights like moles. The steward stepped on the stage and raised his hand, asking for silence, a completely unnecessary gesture.
[...]
We sat on chairs like mannequins and looked at the manager. He looked alarmed and painful - or maybe it was the blame for the lighting. We were guessing that the catastrophe made him stop the film at the most tense moment, but then the manager started talking, and the shudder in his voice confused us even more.

“I want to inform you,” he began, “that the Russians have launched a space satellite into orbit around the earth.” They called it ... "satellite".
The message was greeted with absolute, deathly silence. A full cinema of kids with hedgehogs and tails, in jeans and skirts, with Captain Midnight rings, kids who just found out about Chuck Berry and Little Richards and listened to New York radio stations in the evenings with such a bated heart, as if they were signals from another planet. We grew up on Captain Video and "Terry and the Pirates!". We admired in the comics, as the hero Casey scatters, like pins, a whole bunch of Asians. We have seen Richard Carlson catch thousands of dirty communist spies in “I led a triple life”. We paid a quarter of a dollar for the right to see Hugh Marlowe at Earth versus UFOs and received this damning news as a free app.

I remember very clearly: the terrible dead silence of the cinema hall was suddenly broken by a lonely cry; I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, the voice was full of tears and frightened anger: “Let's show the movie, liar!”

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A little higher, I already noticed that its goal of the race was a propaganda effect - for some reason it was believed that success in space was the first evidence of the “correctness” of a particular state system.

Now it may seem insane, but the madmen could not send a probe to Venus and walk on the moon. In this idea there really are two sensible grains, the first one I will describe below, and the second one is just a national character.



Do not think that we are talking about some kind of metaphysics, everything is extremely simple here - the Russians are natural cosmonauts. We live on the moon for nine months a year and walk in space suits. Hence the ultimate rationalism, even critical realism, if you like. We have everything strictly logical and to the point, not because we are so smart, just the conditions are - forgot to put on a hat and died. As a result, there are no fools in Russia at all - they live with us exactly one year, until winter. All this has its consequences at the global level - Russians have composure, sharpness and endless stress tolerance.


www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_Yp64ZaAJs

Watch this video from the space station. It first shows the spacious American segments of the station. Then narrow metal Russians look miserable, but it is in the Russian module that there is an onboard computer, a bathroom, a docking module, emergency systems and rescue modules. Actually, the entire ISS is in our modules, the rest are not significant.

When the operator enters the central hall of the Russian sector, two astronauts naturally sit at the table and drink tea under the portrait of Gagarin. They are Americans on a space mission - and we are here at home.



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But the first spacewalk of the Americans showed a completely different national character. In America, it is warm, and hence the southern mentality - when any mistake is not fatal and everything can be replayed. The American folk hero is the Big Lebowski and Homer Simpson.



On June 3, 1965, the Jemeny 4 crew prepared for the first American spacewalk. It was the first multi-day flight of the Americans and the task was too large-scale - to work out all the elements of a long-term stay in space, to make sure that it was possible to fly to the moon and identify possible problems. And the problems were not long in coming - the rapprochement with the rocket stage in orbit failed, Jemeny used up almost all the fuel, and the astronauts began to noticeably nervous. The task was canceled and decided to go directly to the spacewalk. But because of the start of a panic attack in Edward White, this task had to be postponed for the third round around the earth.

Nervous White for good reason - the entire flight crew trapped mocking engineering errors. First, the Americans failed to create a lock chamber (!!!) and they simply depressurized the entire ship. But here the main problem lurked them - the engineers took into account the Soviet experience with the swelling spacesuit, but clearly overestimated their capabilities and made the exit hatch completely metallic. Instead of rubber gaskets like our ships, they adjusted all the details to the micron with an accuracy of a micron. Cool, yeah?



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Or another fact - the Soviet lunar program was four times larger than the American one: first, two lunar rovers with radio beacons and cockpits for pilots were landing on the moon. Then two ships were sent to the moon — one with astronauts, the other as a backup — both were landing at a beacon signal. In case of problems, the astronauts calmly sat down in the moon rover and drove to the reserve ship.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGQ1ZAQJzY8

This is where the legs of the lunar conspiracy grow - undoubtedly a noticeable part of the video from the moon captured by Apollo was at least retouched, some shots could be taken on the ground - a complete copy of the lunar surface, modules and space suits were created in the center of NASA with ambiguous accuracy of detail.



Supporters of the “lunar conspiracy” look naive, not because it is obvious. “Surveying” is only the tip of the iceberg on media preparation for a lunar walk. Landing on the moon is all that remains of America in history forever, but it will always be secondary after the first flight. Therefore, in the information space it was important to perform two tasks - to pinch glories from Gagarin as much as possible and to exert maximum information influence. Simply put, it was necessary to show humanity a brighter salute in spite of a second-rate event, and here the entire advertising genius of America manifested itself.

Now it is not noticeable, but the Americans have come from their signature number: We stand on behalf of all of humanity, and not America. Kennedy initially offered Khrushchev to go to the moon together, Armstrong had to set the UN flag as well, and leave a sign with the messages of the leaders of 73 countries of the world next to the flag. The State Commission on the Apollo 11 Flight Symbols met for 6 months, its outcome was the following decision (I will give the whole list):

On the moon will be deployed only the flag of the United States. The small flags of 135 UN member states, as well as the United Nations itself and all US states and territories, will be in the lunar module and return to Earth.


The USSR flag flew to the moon with Apollo 11 and pieces of lunar soil donated to the Soviet Union by the Americans and exhibited in the memorial museum of astronautics at the Exhibition of Economic Achievements in Moscow.

Two full-sized US flags, which previously flew over both buildings of the US Congress (they should have been in the command module all the time), a special postmark for extinguishing, a "moon letter" in the form of an envelope with a trial stamp, which will be repaid by the crew in flight, and a cliche for the subsequent printing of the commemorative stamp “First Man on the Moon”.

In addition to the flag, two more items were left on the moon: a small silicon disk with a diameter of 3.8 cm with miniature statements on it made by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, letters of goodwill from leaders or representatives of 73 states, and the names of the leaders of the US Congress and members of four congressional committees responsible for enacting laws related to NASA and the names of the top NASA leaders who are active and retired, as well as a commemorative metal plate attached to one of the p landing stage "Eagle". It depicted both hemispheres of the Earth, oceans and continents without state borders. Below was the text:


Here, people from planet Earth first set foot on the moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace on behalf of all mankind.

On the plate were engraved the signatures of all three crew members and US President Richard Nixon.

The commission also decided that emotions should be added to the flight, so the astronauts can take personal objects with them on the flight. Armstrong's personal belongings contained a wooden fragment of the left propeller and a piece of cloth from the left upper wing of the Flyer aircraft of the Wright brothers. Aldrin, at the request of his father, took with him a miniature (5 cm x 7.6 cm) autobiography of "American Tsiolkovsky" by Robert Hudar, published in 1966. She became the first book to visit the moon.


Someone forgot their family on the moon

The scenarios of all television programs on the ground, the emblem of the flight, all names and call signs were thought out in detail. In the epic flight should not be anything stupid and comic. And on the moon, Baz Aldrin performed a Catholic communion service.

I accepted the holy gifts and thanked my mind and spirit, which brought two young pilots to the Sea of ​​Tranquility. Interesting, I thought, because the very first drink and the very first food served on the moon is wine and communion bread.

After the flight, Aldrin returned the miniature chalice to Webster's church. Every year on Sunday, closest to July 20, local parishioners there take part in the liturgy of the Lunar Eucharist. Also, the astronauts had the Apollo-1 emblem, Virgil Grissom, Edward White, Roger Chaffee, Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov memorial medals in the pockets of space suits, and a small golden olive branch, the same as the three others that the astronauts bring to their wives, and silicon disk with messages of presidents. All this was left at the landing site of the lunar module. At the same time, the Apollo 11 crew had only one outside the ship’s camera. Therefore, studio “imitations” were shown on American television so that viewers could better imagine the process of the release.

But did you even wonder what the outcome of the Apollo mission was?

Yes, the Americans overtook us at great cost, but the Apollo program had to be curtailed rather quickly - it turned out that there was nothing to do on the moon, the sixties technology does not even allow us to linger on the surface for a couple of days.



From the height of today, it is clear that the space race has overtaken its time by forty years. Like an atomic bomb. The top flight in the era of punched cards and magnetic tapes only pushed aside the real exploration of the moon - now nobody is ready to return to the moon. For the same reason, the ISS is being built so slowly and the development of the entire cosmonautics is slowed down - all prizes have already been taken in the sixties. It seems the space will remain uninhabited desert ... even NASA abandoned the manned missions and switched to the use of lunar rover technology.

The fourth cosmic: what is behind the scenes of the space race?

It seems we have come to the end of our journey, but there is clearly some indentation. Something important is missing, and propaganda is important.

Above, I have already said that the entire space project was based on the television picture. But after all, the topic of space has appeared in state propaganda for the first time



All Hollywood directors from the cockpit to Lucas were loyal fans of Soviet fiction. Thousands of times reviewed films about the pioneers' journey to other planets and made their films in imitation of Soviet propaganda. This well-known fact now seems incredible, but all the key American tapes about space have an obvious Soviet prototype.

Kubrick shot his Space Odyssey in a frame-by-frame imitation of the Soviet blockbuster Road to the Stars, and the star wars built on Lucas's favorite film, The Storm Planet. For example, Chewbacca from star wars is a modified Russian word Dog and so on.



Were Soviet filmmakers more skillful than Hollywood colleagues? Of course, yes, after all, Hollywood itself is a Russian product, it was created by Stanislavsky who specially commissioned the Americans to write his “system”. But the matter is still somewhat deeper - in the communist ideology itself.

It is mistakenly considered that the birthplace of communism is Germany and England where all the red leaders lived and worked. Like everything cultural in Europe, communism was invented in France. You will laugh but communism was originally a literary project at the superman comic level - ideas of social equality and justice were not very exciting in themselves, so they were wrapped in space travel wrappers with blasters and wonderful aliens who will be taught to earthly love. In general, everything that teenagers love.



The main body of the texts was written by people whose names can be read on the stele near the Kremlin walls: Charles Fourier, Auguste Comte, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux and of course my beloved Saint-Simon is an eternally impoverished mad blogger who has gone to very insane ideas like Newton's Church, which should replace Catholicism and spread to the whole universe. People come to the planet and the first thing they put on is the Newton Church of Science. All this is under the dressing of a sexual revolution with common wives and sexual adventures.

As a result, by the 1830s, “sensimonism” became the latest fashion. Being a socialist was just as cool as a Beatles fan a century later. In Moscow, a girl could surrender only for one convincing hint of belonging to an international. Herzen, Belinsky, Ogarev, Anninsky all of them were loyal fans of communism and laid the cornerstone of socialist ideas in Russia.


Stella to the ideologists of communism in the Alexander Garden - now you know why it was so important, until the other day it was demolished.

Thus arose a strong bundle of socialism and the cosmos. That is why the Soviet government was busy all the time with the cosmos, the planetariums and Tsiolkovsky, made a mountain of films about the conquest of interplanetary space. It was her invisible ridge.

But just the same socialist core forever entrenched in science fiction. You will not be able to meet any fantastic work wherever you come across socialist ideas. Even if it is a gloomy post apocalypse like Fallout or futuristic Avatar everywhere you will see the kindly squint of Lenin’s grandfather with freedom-equality-fraternity.


Communist propaganda in 1919.

No wonder that the socialist space program turned out to be better than the capitalist one — it’s just two hundred years old. The space fashion of the 1960s is only an echo and shadow of the space hysteria of the early 19th century.

Fifth cosmic: the speed of light is not redistribution?

It remains only to look at the fourteen previous pages and ask the question - what's next? Spacewalk, orbital station and flight to the moon - is this the limit? This is not even a real space, but “near-earth space”, but what is there, outside the solar system?



In the last decade there has been a real revolution in astronomy, equal to the revolution in physics of the beginning of the last century. Moreover, as in the case of the theory of the atomic nucleus, people have not yet realized the full depth of the change in their view of the world. Even astronomers are just beginning to get used to the new picture of the world. The result of this new picture was the astronomical congress of 2006, which made seemingly contrived decisions about the new classification of planets. In the end, what's the difference - to consider Pluto as a planet or just a “double planetoid”?

But we are talking about changing the whole picture of the world. If earlier it was believed that the solar system is actually a Star and planets circling in close orbits. And somewhere very far in 40 trillion kilometers to be the nearest star Proxima Centauri, she probably has the same planets in small orbits. But between the two solar systems is the emptiness of the cosmos.

Everything changed on November 14, 2003 with the discovery of the planet Sedna in the solar system. The distance to the planet was 14 million kilometers. It fit into the upper boundary of the solar system. However, further, researchers were horrified to find that the aphelion of Sedna’s orbit (maximum distance from the Sun) is 930 a.e (139 billion kilometers). The orbital period of the planet with such an elongated orbit is more than 10,000 years.



The habitat of Sedna is traditionally called the Kuiper belt. Originally it was thought that this is the location of the main mass of solar system comets, that is, objects ranging in size from several tens of meters to several kilometers. Currently, more than 400 objects have been discovered in this area, the dimensions of which exceed 200 km. According to modern estimates, there are 35,000 objects in the Kuiper belt with sizes over 100 km, and the total number of bodies, according to specialists, is estimated at several billion.

In the middle of the 20th century, the hypothetical area of ​​location of the comets was moved further into the so-called Oort Cloud. It was believed that this hypothetical spherical shell surrounding the solar system at a distance of about one light year contained billions of comets with a total mass equal to the mass of the Earth. The coordinates of the cloud were calculated speculatively, by extrapolating the trajectories of known comets.

And what is the hypothetical limit of perturbation of a celestial body by the Sun? This is exactly the distance to the middle of the path between the Sun and Proxima. These are the true dimensions of the grandiose Solar System, which has yet to be studied by a dumbfounded humanity.


Our neighbours

That is, the very first serious study of our own star system radically turned our understanding of the universe - it turned out that space was uniformly planted with matter, only in some places illuminated by the stars. And our own solar system is not at all independent, but physically combined with the nearest stars forming a single planetary system.

Hence, two conclusions - the cosmos is saturated with planets. Star systems are much closer than we thought and often common objects ply between them.

From which it follows that space is filled with life and makes possible contacts of civilizations at the most primitive stages of development, when they are still of interest and nutritional value for each other. You can reach your neighbors even on a ship with the most primitive atomic engine.


The main nuclear engine of the US ships NERVA

And such starships have already been laid. The program of their construction is the second bottom of the space race. If you played Civilization, then you will understand what I mean. For example, GPS and Glonass are subprojects of “nuclear space”, because for orientation in deep space it was planned to use pulsars (stars giving constant radio pulses), for the needs of the military, in 1973 they converted this idea into a navigation system for thirty satellites in medium earth orbit.

In the 1960s, both superpowers designed and started the construction of the first spaceships capable of reaching Alpha Centauri, but both programs were unexpectedly stopped immediately after receiving positive test results from the NERV and RD-0410 engines. Apparently postponed until better times, but in the 1970s, the USSR built a series of military satellites targeting the "legend" with low-power nuclear installations on board. And apparently we are still far ahead of America in this area, a pity the area is classified and what is happening is actually unknown.



The latest public information on this topic dates back to 2011 and reports a new attempt by the Americans to enter into a partnership with Russian space in the field of nuclear engines. However, already in March 2013, the network began to walk interviews with Denis Kovalevich, the head of the Skolkovo space cluster, in which he said that the development of a nuclear power plant was being conducted without the involvement of foreign specialists, since there are many dual technologies there. “This is a Russian project,” said D. Kovalevich.

This was the beginning of the XXI century. We began the twentieth century with a flight attempt and quickly turned our view of the world. Our age begins with a revolution in astronomy and the construction of real starships. So did the theme of the cosmos die?



I think it is just beginning.