THE FIRST ASTRONAUT

Destaque para a coluna do físico Robert Park, What's New:

"On the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, barely a month after Sputnik 1, a dog named Laika was launched on Sputnik 2. Poor Laika survived a few hours at most. President Eisenhower shared a remarkable report with the American people: "Introduction to Outer Space," prepared by his Science Advisory Committee under the direction of James R. Killian, President of MIT. "The cost of transporting men through space will be extremely high," it noted, "but the cost and difficulty of sending information through space will be comparatively low." A year later, however, NASA chose seven military test pilots to be the first astronauts, romanticized by Tom Wolfe in "The Right Stuff." John Glenn was picked for the first orbital flight, but NASA first sent Ham, a chimpanzee, to test the water. In spite of his lack of test pilot experience, Ham did everything John Glenn would do. Both Ham and Glenn would end up in Washington: Glenn in the U.S. Senate, Ham in the National Zoo."

Robert Park

Na imagem: O chimpanzé Ham.