The Pros And Cons Of The Space Race

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The Cold War became a catalyst that instigated the movement to send rockets and satellites to outside the parameters of Earth, to the unknowns of space, and to the worlds away. And if the United States of America and the Soviet Union had become the architects of space aeronautics, the race to space had become their building platforms. Driven to the brink of the Cold War, the two superpowers- the USA, a harbinger of democracy, and the USSR, a vanguard of communism- were pitted against each other. As the late 1960s flung the world into an intermingled state of frantic jingoism and paranoia, both nations were vying to capture the winning title of being technologically superior. Just as the phrase, ‘Space Race,’ entered the English lexicon half…show more content…
Extolled as one of the most economical interplanetary endeavors of the 21st century, the Indian Mangalyaan also cost a mere one-ninths of the expenditures of NASA's $671 million 2008 Maven craft. If the scientific community of the 1950s and 60s zoomed in on the prospects of the moon, the trend has now taken a drastic turn. With new surging evidence that Mars may have once been teeming with the presence of bacterial bugs, scientists have now shifted gears to shed more light on this matter. On the presumed notion that Earth will become too hot to sustain human life in the near-future, scientists have begun to delve deeper into the possibility of a human migration to Mars. Thus, the 21st century has dawned to hint at a novel paradigm for aerospace research. Given a lifespan of around six to twelve months, the unmanned-Mars orbiter will circle the planet to gather data of its atmosphere. The craft carries five scientific instruments: a sensor to gauge the presence and levels of methane gas, a possible marker of life, a color camera to capture images of Mars’ surface, a thermal infrared spectroscopy to measure the temperature of Mars’ surface, an exospheric neutral composition analyzer to study the loss of atmospheric gases to outer space, and a Lyman-alpha photometer to quantify the relative abundance of hydrogen’s two

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