SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Here is the story of a success - culminating in the arrival of man on the moon
- built "despite everything". And here's what's left
NASA, the legend celebrates half century against traffic
from our correspondent Vittorio Zucconi
WASHINGTON - It was 16:44 minutes (and 34 seconds, to be picky) of 6 December 1957 in Cape Canaveral in Florida as "mission control" lit the explosive mixture of liquid oxygen, kerosene and nitrogen contained in the first stage of the Vanguard rocket, to which America had given him hope to carry into orbit the "grapefruit", as it was dubbed the small satellite mounted on its nose.
Under the watchful eye of President Eisenhower and the world, connected on live television, the first stage motor ignited disciplined and exploded after 24 seconds. His journey to launch the first American artificial satellite, to give the response of the "free world" Sputnik to the Kremlin, was exactly four feet, four feet, the shortest space adventure in the history of astronautics. The newspapers have an easy to laugh bitterly. Sputnik was not renamed kaputnik "and" flopnik.
Khrushchev laughed happily. Eisenhower was one of his legendary temper tantrums, often behind the stoic facade of the old general who had led the Allies on the Normandy beaches. A man only smiled pleased that day from a distance from his office in missile research center in Alabama. It was still a young German engineer of forty years, a man who wore the black uniform with the skulls of the SS, the father of those weapons of Nazi revenge, the V1 and V2, which were were manufactured by the slaves deported from occupied for months and were rained on the heads of innocent Londoners.
The great machine of the Cold War had cleaned up, remove the stain, bleached and a naturalized American, because he and he alone, Wehrner Von Braun had the right missile, the best design, the key that would open the doors for America the sky. 
Eight months after the flop of the grapefruit in Cape Canaveral, when Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower was signed on 29 July 1958, the birth of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, the U.S. space agency created with the task to gather and coordinate the debris and pieces of programs and space projects rivals, would he, Von Braun, who would become the dominant and unattainable "virgin of the stars" in the seemingly infallible ruler of the race to space, just twelve years after the "flopnik" would bring us men on the Moon robot on Mars and willing to explore the possibility of life beyond Earth. Fifty years of existence, the previously infallible big girl now looked like a lady rather faded and sailed too, is the measure along to what has been rapid and overwhelming that race to the scientific, but in reality political, ideological and military , the void beyond our atmosphere and the solar system. A half century of existence reaffirmed, through the shame of the flight of four feet in the project to establish human colonies on the Moon and Mars, the view that a great connoisseur of America as Winston Churchill had said: "You can always count on the fact that Americans do all the wrong things before you make that right. "
is almost impossible, today, while the former Soviet Union seems more committed to rake Football Club and blackmail consumers of its oil, and the last vehicle for orbital trips, the Shuttle, is preparing for the permanent retirement soon More than a year, revived a sense of historical defeat and panic that gripped America in the late fifties and in those early sixties.
The Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Kosygin then simply dominated the space, with a number of firsts to witness Neil Armstrong impeccable as he listed in his preface to the memoirs of Mr Scott and Leonov of Russia, the two Faces of the Moon: the first orbiting satellite, Sputnik in 1957, visible to the naked eye early in the launch (and martyrdom) of a living creature, the dog Laika, the first flight of a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, the first spacewalk , with Alexei Leonov, first in sending a woman into orbit, launching the first in a multi-pilot crew, the first to reach the Moon, Venus and Mars probes.
But NASA had Von Braun the engine, fuel and John F Kennedy in the competition with the Soviets that stimulus which always requires to shake this nation from its complacent slumber. With a curious combination of exclusive Masons and former Nazis to their top administrative and planning director at the Von Braun James Webb (Aldrin and displayed proudly wore the ring of Freemasonry in any official photos, often cut or copied from retouchers NASA) the transformation from amateur of the first steps to the iron, the German organization of the effort that led Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the Sea of \u200b\u200bTranquility on July 20, 1969 was staggering. Comparable
only by commitment, determination and enthusiasm popular, the "Manhattan Project" that in four years, with one hundred and thirty thousand employees and a cost of thirty billion dollars at present value, produced the first atomic weapon. Or the huge mobilization of human and industrial after Pearl Harbor, when America went from a laughable army trained with broomsticks for lack of machine guns to build merchant knew that irresistible "Liberty" in twenty-four hours, from scratch.
Today, fifty years later, while the eighteen billion dollars allocated by Congress for the 2008 budget looks set to continue operating centers and bases to appease senators and deputies, and the Saturn V, Apollo, the carrier, such as rust a whale aground on the beaches of Cape Canaveral, remember the value and significance of the golden era of the "blank space" in the sixties requires an effort of historical imagination, even for those who lived those years and knew.
The irresistible rise of NASA, from the ashes of the first flop to the emotion for the global footprint of Armstrong on the moon, was flying upwind compared to the mood and spirit of the time in that decade. The first launches of the Mercury capsule, the first successful orbital flight of John Glenn, the boldness of the Apollo project, the tragedy of the three Apollo astronauts burned to death in the fire I live the drama of Apollo XIII, traveled against traffic on the road a nation that ran through the darkness of the murders Political, Vietnam, Sixty, violence and demoralization.
NASA did not bring America to the Moon. Reported the Moon in America, making the fantastic stunt "that number techno-political-propaganda that restored their sense of global primacy, battered by Sputnik, worm-eaten by the war in Vietnam and that bullet holes in those years down two Kennedy and two civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
so incomprehensible it was this ability to be wonderful and perfect in times of confusion and imperfection, that his achievements are suspect, theories, accusations of manipulation. From the day, seventy- hours after landing on the moon, a mysterious character with glasses and trench coat blacks from Once Upon a Time in the West turned in the press room at the Jet Propulsion in Pasadena, the center of research and monitoring that NASA and the University of California, Caltech, divided by distributing a press release to warn that the moon landing was pure fiction and the "astronauts" were "roach" in the Mojave Desert in California, the conspiracy buffs resist.
There is even a large literature of those who think the opposite, that men and probes NASA have discovered signs of drug lost civilizations, structures, pyramids corroded, even death, and artifacts that city leaders hiding and pretending makeup photos breakdowns, because we humans would not be ready yet to confront the reality of a universe inhabited by other creatures. A confidential Neil Armstrong's famous phrase, that seventy years of age continues to live in silence, has always fed the suspicion that NASA knows much more than what he says or shows: "There are wonderful things out there is staggering, if only knew how to remove the veils from the truth. " 
But the problem NASA is not to lie about discoveries still unpronounceable, which could, on the contrary, serve to excite the people of the citizens, then the taxpayer. Instead, it is to convince presidents, parliaments, the public, that his mission is still relevant to the future of America and humanity and agency of state as it can do more and better than the private, extra-planetary exploration now want to participate, would have done. The "presumption of infallibility" that had accompanied her in the sixties ended with the double catastrophe of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia, devoured on live television to take off and return. plans for the colonization of the Moon in 2020 and then to Mars, involving investment of popular enthusiasm that the public treasury and offers - always fell short - can not even imagine, and even the space station, the permanent base beyond the atmosphere, was gradually decreased in the ambitions and functions.
may be the Chinese, who have begun to scratch the area with their first shots, or the Indians to turn the anxiety and the nationalistic pride of half a century ago? It will be some shocking revelation came from Mars, where there are shown details tasty but not convincing as possible elementary life? For now, despite his occasional successes with automated probes, with the always amazing Hubble Space Telescope, and with the end of the Shuttle for which there are no ready successors, NASA looks back to the toil of small daily experimental work.
These days, it is engaged in a campaign for the collection of urine, urine buckets asking for volunteers to study how to eliminate long stays in the future on the planets, and no longer asks if you see God in heaven, as the first cosmonauts and astronauts could be heard asking. But how males and females can establish relationships and to love without getting in a fight Gyro head out of jealousy and rivalry, confined for months and years sealed inside spaceships and bases. And if you talk about sex and pee in space may seem even more humiliating the "flopnik" of Vanguard, is this reduction of space in newspapers and very human problems that is proof of the success of NASA. One who has succeeded in making possible the unthinkable fifty years and as normal potty from a night that was fiction.
(July 27, 2008)
http://www.repubblica.it/2007/10/sezioni/scienza_e_tecnologia/nasa/zucconi-27lug/zucconi-27lug.html
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