The POP EXPOSE ‘Mars the next frontier’ by Mitchell Smith!
Humans have always had a curiosity of what’s over the next horizon. The Vikings, Columbus, and Kennedy are just a few who pushed the bar and pushed people to the limit to explore and discover. We have spent lots of time on Earth exploring mountain tops, ocean bottoms, and everything in between. Many mysteries still remain, but over the past 4+ decades space exploration has grown and put us into a much larger world. On September 12, 1962 JFK said “We choose to go to the moon”, a little more than a year after Russian Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and to orbit the Earth.
The great space race had began. It has not come without fail or great sacrifice though. Many unmanned rockets failed to even get off the launch pad and in 1967 three astronauts sat waiting in the cockpit of Apollo 1, Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were ready to become national heroes when everything went south and the cabin caught on fire killing the three. The death of the three was not in vain though, they have been NASA’s inspiration since the horrific tragedy. This happened before my time, so the first tragedy I can remember is the 1986 explosion of the Shuttle Challenger. I was home sick from school (3rd grade), and was watching the launch live. The Space exploration was in full swing, and yet a again was put on hold by this tragedy. This was a big mission with a crew of 7 including Christa McAuliffe a teacher from New Hampshire who had signed up for Ronald Reagan’s teacher in space program and was selected from a group of 11,000 applicants.
Once again they would not die in vain, the space program pushed through and NASA learned from their mistakes. 2003 was the most recent disaster when the shuttle Discovery exploded upon it’s return to Earth. Once again a 7 person crew was lost but not forgotten. Despite everything that has gone wrong, there have been many more things that have gone right than wrong. After a recent visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, I was amazed and inspired by the work at NASA. The US is sending supplies to our space station on a regular basis and we plan to join our Rover on MARS by sending a manned vessel there in the year 2035. If we can successfully get to MARS and set up a base station there then who knows the next step will be to go to Jupiter or at least set up a space station orbiting Jupiter to be able to transport goods and supplies, and then go to the next planet and eventually go beyond our solar system, and bounce images from one satellite to the next all the way back to Earth.
It will take time, but we will get satellites and telescopes to the edge of the galaxy and we will be able to see just what is beyond the grasps of our long range telescopes here on Earth. As we entered the 1900s there were books and a couple movies about space travel. Things people only dreamed about. In 1951 the Movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” captured the minds of millions of an Alien visit, and from then there have been many Space Movies made, such as Alien, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Along with them there have been many TV series such as Buck Rogers, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica. There have also been some great motion pictures that depicted a much more realistic view on space, such as Apollo 13, Gravity, and The Martian. There have been countless other movies, TV series, and books written about space travel and what’s beyond our solar system. All of them over the years have lead us to this wild fantasy of space travel. Now the time has come and it is within our reach and who knows, one of us could be the next person in space or the first person on Mars.
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