Human spaceflight is the driver for most activities that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) undertakes. While NASA certainly has a rich aviation research heritage and has also done pathbreaking scientific and applications work using robotic spacecraft, human spaceflight is a difficult and expensive endeavor that engenders great popular enthusiasm and support for NASA. Much of this public interest sterns from pushing boundaries of adventure, by exploring the unique and challenging physical environment of space. Humans can also perform tasks in space that machines cannot. We can think, analyze, and make judgment calls based on experience and intuition in real time. In little more than forty years, we have gone from thinking, planning, and hoping that humans will enter space to having rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts permanently living aboard an International Space Station (ISS). We have moved from the Cold War, which set the historical context for superpower competition in space during the 1960s, to Joint ISS missions involving over a dozen cooperating nations. Not only have humans proved that it is possible to survive in the harsh physical environment of space, but astronauts and cosmonauts have conducted important scientific and engineering feats in space. We've discovered that microgravity is a unique laboratory setting that is potentially useful for scientists in a broad array of disciplines such as pharmacology, materials science, and physics, as well as more obvious fields such as astronomy. The pool of people who have flown in space has also broadened tremendously in the past forty years. We have moved from a group of seven handpicked men that were trained as military test pilots to men and women of many national and professional backgrounds. Diversity has become an avowed goal of most federal agencies, including NASA, so that people of many ethnicities and personal backgrounds not only fly in space but serve in key roles on the ground. Older astronauts in their sixties and even seventies have flown in space. Beyond pilots and commanders, NASA now trains scientists and engineers as payload specialists to fly in space. Even more than the payload specialists who are not 'career astronauts,' NASA has tried to bring other civilians, such as teachers, into space. The issues of diversity in general and of civilians in space in particular have ebbed and flowed in importance over time but continue to be relevant. In recent history, the subject of paying tourists in space has come to the forefront.


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    Title :

    Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Forty Years of US Human Spaceflight Symposium


    Publication date :

    2002


    Size :

    242 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English






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