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20th Century Engineering — Part 2
Published in Ervan Garrison, A History of Engineering and Technology Artful Methods, 2018
In fact, the 1964 Voskhod, a second-generation Soviet spacecraft replacing the one-man Vostock, weighed in at 5,300 kilograms almost the weight the U.S. Apollo spacecraft of five years later. The U.S. National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA) formed out of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA). In existence since 1915, NACA was a service organization which conducted extensive scientific laboratory research in aeronautics.141 Its mission was to aeronautical research and the development of true aerospace vehicles. Implicit in this was the charge to “catch the Soviets.” Before the Mercury series of sub-orbital manned flights could begin in earnest the U.S. was one-upped by the Soviets again. The Vostok series put men into space with the launch of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. Challenged, the U.S. response was to develop a program to place a man on the moon — which it did successfully on July 20, 1969. Between these watershed events was an era of almost unparalleled advance in technology for space flight.
Space Technology
Published in Mohammad Razani, Information, Communication, and Space Technology, 2017
The space race continued with the first human flight by Vostok 1 taking Yuri Gagarin, the 27-year-old Russian cosmonaut, in orbit around the globe in about 108 minutes on April 12, 1961. This was the start of a new era in space exploration which we can call the “human spaceflight era.” The next orbital flight around the Earth was John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 which took place on February 20, 1962. It took 42 years from the Vostok launch for a third country to enter into the human spaceflight race. China launched Yang Liwei into space on October 15, 2003, aboard the Shenzhou 5 (Spaceboat 5) spacecraft.
Commercial Space Technologies
Published in Mohammad Razani, Commercial Space Technologies and Applications, 2018
The space race continued with the first human flight by Vostok 1 taking Yuri Gagarin, the 27-year-old Russian cosmonaut, in orbit around the globe in about 108 min on April 12, 1961. This was the start of a new era in space exploration which we can call the “human spaceflight era.” The next orbital flight around the Earth was John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 which took place on February 20, 1962. It took 42 years from the Vostok launch for a third country to enter into the human spaceflight race. China launched Yang Liwei into space on October 15, 2003, aboard the Shenzhou 5 (Spaceboat 5) spacecraft.
Aerothermodynamic design and performance analysis of modified nose cones for space reentry vehicles
Published in International Journal of Ambient Energy, 2022
Raja Muthu, S. Siva Lakshmi, Santhoshini Babu
The study of reentry vehicles and their entry dynamics was important in order to get a clear idea regarding the conceptual physics behind the reentry vehicles. The principle of rocket propulsion was first observed by the ancient Greeks. The earliest rockets were solid propellant rockets (or solid rockets) with gunpowder (black powder) as propellant. The rush to space was initially started on 12 April 1961, when the space launcher Vostok (8K72) put the spaceship Vostok (Vostok-3KA) into orbit with the first cosmonaut, an Air Force pilot Yurii A. Gagarin. NASA has also been involved in the use of reentry vehicles since the early 1960s, including manned space programs like Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, etc. Today, successful reentry of space vehicles has become possible only after John Glenn who suggested the perfect shape for reentry spacecraft in 1962 after considerable research in high-speed aerodynamics. Originally, the major concern of reentry was to find a way to survive the intense aerodynamic heating. During the period of 1960–1980, various reentry trajectories lie skipping, lifting line are tested to overcome the aerodynamic heating. Then during mid of 1990, ablative heat shields were used as thermal protection systems to reduce the aerodynamic heating. But, even in 2003, it was observed that Columbia spacecraft explosion was mainly due to the failure of thermal protection systems to withstand aerodynamic heating (Gruntman 2004). Thus, in the early twenty-first century, many research works are going in order to reduce the aerodynamic heating to protect the spacecrafts from explosion.