Astronauts and Cosmonauts are awesome inspiration to space travelers
Traveling on a space mission to
an unknown destination, risking life to find out new discoveries and to help
humanity in exploring ‘what is out there in the universe’? The continuous
quest for knowledge of the human race opened up new avenues for an alternate
source of living in the universe in case earth where we live disappears. Travel to different planets to find out
suitable conditions to human life, with minimum requirements of water and air
and other living conditions is one of the objectives of space travel or space
expeditions.These space expeditions started
ways back to 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik
1, the world's first man-made satellite.
With a successful launch of sputnik 1,
in the same year Sputnik 2 carried a live dog Laika and this animal became the
first animal to move around the earth. With the success of these two
experiments a spacecraft was launched with human being and Yuri Gagarin in the year
1961and the name of the space craft that carried him is Vostok 1 by the Soviet
Union. Then followed a series of space ventures with first
American Alan Shepard and then by John Glenn, who orbited the Earth three times
in 1962.
Problems for Space Mission Travelers
Among umpteen numbers of problems
the most dangerous are space debris, cosmic clouds.
There are some satellites like
(US Vanguard 1 satellite) that did not return to earth as scheduled. They are
still rotating around the earth. Around 2000 satellites are launched since 1957
and few of them did not come back might have collided with each other and
broken to tiny pieces. These pieces could be bolts and nuts or any thing that
constitutes the satellite. Imagine the moment they would have gained by
rotating around the earth at the speed of 4 miles per second. If they hit a
moving satellite with life in it the result will be lethal. One such experience
is a miraculous escape of Space Shuttle Challenger hit by a paint fleck on
their window returned home with damage.
Meteoroids and micro meteoroids:
These are the natural space debris. Meteoroids are small pieces of rocks formed
at the beginning of the Solar System. Micro meteoroids are even smaller pieces
of meteoroids, often weighing less than a gram. These tiny particles in the
space with different weather conditions may gang up as a powerful cloud called
cosmic dust clouds, these nasty cosmic clouds become nasty at those speeds may
change the trajectory of the spacecraft! If an astronaut or cosmonaut is held
up in the midst of this deadly cloud imagine how far the space travelers space
suit could withstand and the miserable state of the space craft itself.
Other dangers: The space travelers bone becomes weak with a long space walk, weaker than old women on
earth. The muscles become small for space walkers since space does not have
gravity and bones do not get required protein to produce new bone cells or to
repair damaged bone cells. It is reported that the space travelers do osteoporosis-like
effects, 10 times loos of bone density per year than humans on earth. They have
the risk of bone fractures even after return to earth.
The ambition of the space travelers did not stop at orbiting the earth, landing on the moon, exploring
Saturn and Jupiter. The inspiration space mission got from sputnik laugh to
exploring planets to galaxies. The inspiration started with the desire to fly
like birds, motivated them to invent
air crafts to satellites and now sky is the limit.