Page 128 - Grasp English C1+ (Student Book)

9 Cosmology

“3, 2, 1, 0! All engines running. Lift-off. We have a lift-off.” These were the words spoken by NASA’s team when Neil
Armstrong left the earth in Apollo 11 on the first mission in which a man would step on the surface of our moon.
In the late 1950s and throughout the 60s, Russia and the US were competing in the space race to see which
country had the technological superiority to get a man to the moon. At the time, there were also a number of
unmanned missions to Mars. Following a series of unsuccessful launches, NASA succeeded in getting close-up
pictures of the Red Planet in 1964, when Mariner 4 performed the first-ever fly-by.
Since then, there have been a series of Mars expeditions, carried out mainly by NASA but also by Russian,
European and Chinese space agencies. A lot of them have successfully entered orbit or been used to study the
asteroid belt which lies between the Red Planet and Jupiter. However, these have all been manned by robotics,
simply because we do not yet have the technology to send astronauts to Mars comfortably. One of the main
issues is gravity. We have the theoretical knowledge to create artificial gravity on space shuttles, and scientists
regularly live in a zero-gravity environment during their six-month missions to the International Space Station;
however, we as yet have not got the ability, or necessary funds, to produce a machine capable of actually
creating artificial gravity.

This significantly reduces the likelihood of humans colonising Mars any time soon. Additionally, there is the
question of how a shuttle to the Red Planet would be protected against dangerous cosmic rays for the duration
of the voyage. Considering that even just flying by plane exposes passengers to cosmic rays and given that
previous shuttle malfunctions have been attributed to cosmic rays, nobody wants to run the risk of arriving on
Mars with radiation poisoning, or not arriving at all.
That said, people are still dreaming big. Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who accompanied Neil Armstrong on the first
manned mission to the moon, has written a number of books outlining a plan to send people to Mars. Additionally,
Elon Musk, a well-known South African technology entrepreneur, announced plans in 2016 to produce the first
colonist transporter. But, at least for the time being, life on Mars is not a viable option.

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