Space Tourism

Space Tourism

On the 12th of April 1961, Yuri Gagarin becamethe first ever human to venture into space. On that day, he saw the world in a way thatno human had ever seen before. Since then, just 560 people have been into space, most of them being trained astronauts that spent years preparing for their flights. But when will the rest of us get a chanceto visit space? And what will we do when we get therthere ? Now we’re going to look at thefuture of space tourism. We’re also going to look at the private astronauts that have paid to go into space and how reusable rockets could help to kick start the space tourism industry.

Since the beginning of spaceflight, only 7 people have paid to go to space. In 2001, American entrepreneur Dennis Titopaid $20 million for an 8-day trip to the International Space Station. At the time, NASA thought it was inappropriate for tourists to go to space, so they refused to train him. Instead, he partnered with the Russian’sand took a ride on Soyuz mission TM32 along with two Cosmonauts. He recalls the spectacular moment when helooked out of his window for the first time and saw the curvature of the Earth againstthe darkness of space. Dennis spent a total of 8 days on the ISS where he performed various experiments and admired the incredible view of Earth. So far, the amount of paying visitors to spacehas been very low, but all that could change in the near future. With multiple private space companies developing reusable spacecraft, the cost of spaceflight is starting to lower dramatically.

Blue Origin are developing their ‘New Shepard’ spacecraft specifically for tourism flights into space. This capsule has 6 seats with the largest windows ever seen in a spacecraft. During these flights, the rocket will accelerateup to 100km in altitude before cutting off the engine and releasing the capsule. At this point, the capsule is essentiallyin free fall but still travelling upwards to its highest point. Passengers inside the capsule will be able to leave their seats and experience the effects of weightlessness. A few minutes later, the passengers will returnto their seats before the capsule enters the atmosphere and the effects of weightlessnessdisappear. Although these flights will be extremely short,the reusability of this rocket could give customers a chance to experience the wondersof space from a price as low as $200,000. Although this will still only satisfy the super rich, it’s a step in the right direction if spaceflight is to ever achieve the price and safety standards of airliners. But as the industry grows and companies competeto develop the cheapest ride into space, these prices could fall even more.

If each space vehicle can be reused multipletimes before needing serious refurbishment, the customer will only need to cover the cost of crew and fuel. An airplane can fly multiple times per day,and conduct tens of thousands of flights over its lifetime. If a rocket can reach even a fraction of those numbers, space tourism could be opened up to the wider public. But developing a cheap ride into space isonly half of the problem. The cost of actually living in space is stillan incredibly expensive luxury. In order to run the International Space Stationit costs NASA around $4 Billion each year. After years of avoiding commercialization, NASA recently opened up the ISS to paying customers. But with the extremely high running costs,the ISS is still just a destination for the wealthy. In order to have food and air during yourstay on the ISS, it will cost you $22,500 per day. Once everything else like power and wifi isincluded, a one night stay onboard the ISS will cost you at least $35,000. In order for space tourism to become a reality,the cost of building and operating a habitat in space will need to be drastically reduced.

Space Technology startup ‘Bigelow Aerospace’ are developing large inflatable space station modules. These modules can be packed into a rocket’s payload bay and inflated into a much larger size when in space. The idea is that large expandable modules like these could be the perfect foundation for space hotels. Currently, the ISS requires an enormous teamof people working 24 hours a day just to keep the station running. Bigelow Aerospace are hoping to simplify the operation of their modules and reduce the running cost. And since they are easier to manufacture and cheaper to launch than traditional space station modules, they could reduce the cost of livingin space all together. So altho byugh the idea of space tourism may seem like a distant fantasy. The incredible advancements in reusable rocketsand space modules could soon open the door for a brand new generation of explorers.

 

Gravitation Wave

The Gravitational

 Waves

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, predicted by Einstein’s laws of general relativity, but they are incredibly difficult to detect. To see them you need a detector that can accurately measure distances 10,000 times smaller than a proton. Thats crazy! That’s like trying to measure the distance from our Sun to the nearest star to accuracy of the width human hair. But we have a technology on Earth that can do that:  ALIGO the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, and back in November 2015, on a Monday morning, LIGO detected the first gravitational wave that humans have ever directly observed. Where they came from and what this means for space science is nothing short of mind blowing!

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far faraway. 1.3 billion years ago and1.3 billion light years away, two black holes were stuck in a perilous orbit around one another getting closer and closer. Black holes are incredible objects, they pull of their gravity - the amount they bend spacetime - is so strong that no light can escape them. No one knows what exists in the centre ofa black hole as normal physics completely breaks down. What we do know is that they are infinitely dense. One of these orbiting black holes was 29 times the mass of the Sun and the other was 36 times the mass of the Sun, but they were only about 200km wide. Which is tiny in comparison to the Sun which is over a million kilometres wide! And these black holes were orbiting each other really really fast, about the same frequency as the blade on a blender.

Imagine that, such massive objects rotating so quickly. These orbiting masses created ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, and the closer they orbited the bigger these waves got, until the black holes collided at half of the speed of light. And when they merged they formed a new blackhole that rang kind of like a bell, throwing out colossal amounts of energy as gravitational waves until it settled into a perfect sphere. And all of this happened in 0.2 seconds. And in the collision, they turned a huge amountof mass into gravitational wave energy. They lost a mass equal to three times the mass of the Sun which got turned in to gravitational wave energy by Einsteins equation E=mc^2. This created a huge wake of gravitational waves that ripped out in all directions at the speed of light. And, and this is the thing that gets us, over that last fifth of a second this collision released more than ten times more energy than total output of all of the stars in the entire rest of the Universe! It just completely boggles the mind! Meanwhile on Earth… At this exact time our planet was looking very different to what we see now. It was a barren wasteland, there was no grass or trees, in fact no plants or animals at all. Life at this stage had only come as far as microscopic multicellular creatures that lived in the sea.

And while the gravitational waves tore through space towards us all of the complex life on Earth evolved and grew: plants and animals developed, amphibians crawled on land, there was extinctions, reptiles and dinosaurs and mammals, more extinctions. Primates evolved into all of human civilization right up until Saturday 12th November 2015 when the scientists at LIGO turned it on to begin their initial tests. A mere two days later and just in time the gravitational waves flew past us and the first direct detection on Earth was made. And that sound bumping is actually what these waves sounded like. Even though gravitational-waves are ripples in spacetime and not ripples in the air, they vibrate at similar frequencies, so we canactually turn them into sound waves and listen to them … boop … It might not sound very impressive, but detection of gravitational waves means a huge amount for science. The results of this detection have already been profound. This is the very first time that black holes have been directly detected, in fact gravitational waves are the only way you can directly detect them!

It will hopefully be able to look at what makes stars go supernova, and might be able to probe the very nature of spacetime and see if it is made of things called cosmic strings. But the most exciting thing is that we don’tknow what it will find. This is one of the best parts of science,when you’ve got a new tool to peer into a realm of reality that you’ve never been able to access before. Who knows what you’ll find? May be you’ll discover things that help explain some of the great mysteries of the Universe, maybe we’ll find things that we can’t explain at all, and then we have to come up with new physics. In any case I find it super exciting and no one can’t wait to see more results. So there you go, those are the basics of gravitational wave astronomy.

Galaectic Collision

Milkyway 

Vs 

Andromeda

 Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescopeto forecast a future cosmic pile up: the titanic collision of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy in about four billion years time. The Andromeda Galaxy, some 2.2 million light-years away, is the closest spiral galaxy to our home, the Milky Way. 

For around a century,astronomers have known it is moving towards us, but whether or not the two galaxies wouldactually collide, or simply fly past each other, remained unclear. Now, a team of astronomershas used the Hubble Space Telescope to shed light on this question, by looking at the motion stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. We wanted to figure out how Andromeda was moving through space. So in order to do that we measured the location of the Andromeda stars relative to the background galaxies.

 In 2002 they were in one place, and in 2010 they were in a slightly different place. And that allowed us to measure the motion over a period of eight years. The motion is actually incredibly subtle,and not obvious to the human eye, even when looking at Hubble's sharp images. However,sophisticated image analysis revealed tiny movements that the scientists were able to project into the future. Based on these findings, it is finally possibleto show what will happen to the Milky Way over the next eight billion years, as theg galaexies drift closer, then collide and gradually merge into a single, larger, elliptical galaxy with reedish stars. 

And might the Solar System should in fact survive this huge crash. The reason we think that our Solar System will not be much affected by this collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda is that galexies are mostly empty space. Even though our galaxy, as well as the Andromeda Galaxy, has a hundred billion stars in it, they are very far apart. So if two galaxies actually collide with each other, the stars basically pass right between each other and thecthe of two stars directly hitting each other is really, really small. So the likelihood that our Solar System will be directly impacted by another star, for example, in Andromeda as we collide with it is really, really small. Well, if life is still present on Earth when this happens, the changes in the sky will be quite spectacular. 

This collision will be very very slow because the time scales on the scales of galaxies in the Universe are very very long. So you have to think, millions of years but even then over these timescales over millionsof years, we will see big changes. If we wait a few billion years, Andromeda will be huge on the sky. It will be as big as our Milky Way because we'll be very close to it. And then later, when the galaxies merge, the merged remnant of the Milky Way Galaxy and Andromeda will look more like an elliptical galaxy and we'll be sitting right in it. So the view of the Milky Way on the nightsky will be completely gone and this band of light will be replaced by a more spheroidal distribution of light. And so, the Sun, born in the Milky Way almost 5 billion years ago will end its life in a new orbit, as part of a new galaxy. 

Astronomy vs Astrology

Astronomy 

Vs

Astronomy

The word Astronomy meaning "the study of stars" in initial stage but the words change meaning over time, and  it’s pretty well understood that astronomy is science, and astrology… isn’t. Millennia ago, astrology was as close to science as you got. It had some of the flavors of science: astrologers observed the skies, made predictions about how it would affect people, and then those people would provide evidence for it by swearing up and down it worked. The thing is, it really didn’t; the fault of astrology lies in ourselves and not our stars. People tend to remember the hits and forget the misses when predictions are made, which is why they sometimes sit in casino spumping nickels into machines that are in proven to be nothing more than a method for reducing the number of nickels you have. But astrology led to people to really study the sky, and find the patterns there, which led to a more rigorous understanding of how things worked in the heavenly vault. It wasn’t overnight, of course. This took centuries.

Before the invention of the telescope, keen observers built all sorts of odd and wonderful devices to measure the heavens, and in fact it was before the telescope was first turned to the sky that a huge revolution in astronomy took place. It is patently obvious that the ground you stand on is fixed, rooted if you will, and the skies turn above us. The sun rises, the sun sets. The moon rises and sets, the stars themselves wheel around the sky at night. Clearly, the Earth is motionless, and the sky is what is actually moving. In fact, if you think about it, geocentrism makes perfect sense that all the objects inthe sky revolve about the Earth, and are fixed to a series of nested spheres, some of which are transparent, maybe made of crystal, which spin once per day. The stars may just be holes in theotherwise opaque sphere, letting sunlight though. Sounds silly to you, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the thing: If you don’t have today’s modern understanding of how the cosmos works, this whole multiple-shells-of-things-in-the-sky thing actually does make sense. It explains a lot of what’s going on over your head, and if it was good enough for Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy, then by god it was good enough for you. And speaking of which, it was endorsed by the major religions of the time, so may be it’s better if you just nod and agree and don’t think about it too hard.

But a few centuries ago things changed. Although he wasn’t the first, the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus came up with the idea that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the Earth. His ideas had problems,which we’ll get to in a later episode, but it did an incrementally better job than geocentrism. And then along came Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, who modified that system, making it even better. Then Isaac Newton - oh, Newton- he invented calculus partly to help him understand the way objects moved in space. Over time, our math got better, our physics got better, and our understanding grew. Applied math was a revolution in astronomy, and then the use of telescopes was another. Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, by the way, but made them better; Newton inventeda new kind that was even better than that, and we’ve run with the idea from there.

Then, about a century or so ago, came another revolution: photography. We could capture much fainter objects on glass plates sprayedwith light-sensitive chemicals, which revealed stars otherwise invisible to us, details in galaxies,beautiful clouds of gas and dust in space. And then in the latter half of the last century, digital detectors were invented, which were even more sensitive than film. We could use computers to directly analyze observations, and our knowledge leaped again. When thesewere coupled with telescopes sent in orbit around the Earth - where our roiling and boiling atmosphere doesn’t blur out observations - we began yet another revolution. And where are we now? We’ve come such a long way! What questionscan we routinely ask that our ancestors would not have dared, what statements made witha pretty good degree of certainty?

Think on this: The lights in the sky are stars! There are other worlds. We take the idea of looking for life on alien planets seriously, and spend billions of dollars doing it. Our galaxy is one of a hundred billion others. We can only directly see 4% of the Universe. Stars explode, and when they do they createthe stuff of life: the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the phosphorus that is the backbone of our DNA. The most common kind of star in the Universe is so faint you can’t see it without a telescope. Our solar system is filled to overflowing with worlds more bizarre than we could have dreamed. Nature has more imagination than we do. It comes up with some nutty stuff. We’re clever too, we big-brained apes. We’ve learneda lot… but there’s still a long way to go. So, with that, I think we’re ready.

Let’sexplore the universe. Astronomers aren’t just people who operate telescopes, but include mathematicians, engineers, technicians, programmers, and even artists. They also wrapped up with a quick history of the origins and development of astronomy, from ancient observers to the Hubble SpaceTelescope.

Astronomy

Astronomy

The Science of Stars

Talking of science. What is science? There are lots of definitions of science,but I’ll say that it’s a body of knowledge, and a method of how we learned that knowledge. Science tells us that stuff we know may not be perfectly known; it may be partly or entirely wrong. We need to watch the Universe, see how it behaves, make guesses about why it’s doing what it’s doing, and then try to thinkof ways to support or disprove those ideas. That last part is important. Science must be, above all else, honestly if we really want to get to the bottom of things. Understanding that our understanding might be wrong is essential, and trying to figure out the ways we may be mistaken is the only way that science can help us find our way to the truth, or at least the nearest approximationto it. Science learns. We meander a bit as we use it, but in the long run we get ever closer to understanding reality, and that is the strength of science. And it’s all around us!

Whether you know it or not, you’re soaking in science. You’re a primate. You have mass. Mitochondria in your cells are generating energy. Presumably,you’re breathing oxygen. But astronomy is different. It’s still science, ofcourse, but astronomy puts you in your place. Because of astronomy, I know we’re standing on a sphere of mostly molten rock and metal 13,000 kilometers across, with a fuzzy atmosphere about 100 km high, surrounded by a magnetic field that protects us from the onslaught of subatomic particles from the Sun 150 million km away, which is also flooding space withlight that reaches across space, to illuminate the planets, asteroids, dust, and comets,racing out past the Kuiper Belt, through the Oort Cloud, into interstellar space, pastthe nearest stars, which orbit along with gas clouds and dust lanes in a gigantic spiralgalaxy we call the Milky Way that has a supermassive black hole in its center, and is surroundedby 150 globular clusters and a halo of dark matter and dwarf galaxies, some of which it’seating, all of which can be seen by other galaxies in our Local Group like Andromedaand Triangulum, and our group is on the outskirts of the Virgo galaxy cluster, which is partof the Virgo supercluster, which is just one of many other gigantic structures that stretchmost of the way across the visible Universe, which is 90-billion light years across andexpanding every day, even faster today than yesterday due to mysterious dark energy, andeven all that might be part of an infinitely larger multiverse that extends forever bothin time and space.

See? Astronomy puts you in your place. But what exactly is astronomy? This isn’tnecessarily an obvious thing to ask. When I was a kid, it was easy: Astronomy is thestudy of things in the sky. The sun, moon, stars, galaxies, and stuff like that. Butit’s not so easy to pigeonhole these days. Take, for example, Mars. When I haul my ‘scopeout to the end of my driveway and look at Mars, that’s astronomy, right? Of course!But what about the rovers there? Those machines aren’t doing astronomy, surely. They’re doing chemistry, geology, hydrology, petrology… everything but astronomy! So nowadays, what’s astronomy? I’d say it’s still studying stuff in the sky, but it’s branched out quite a bit from there.Borders between it and other fields of science are fuzzy. Humans might like firm, delineated boundaries between things,but nature isn’t so picky.

Astronomers

Who are we? What do we do? I used to look through telescopes for a living,or at least study the data that came from detectors strapped onto them. But now they talk and write (and make videos) about astronomy, and relegate my viewing to their personal backyard telescope. But they still consider themself an astronomer, so that should give you an idea that there’s a lot of wiggle room in the profession. Doing the observations fit the physicalmodel of how stars blow up, or how galaxies form, or the way gas flows through space?Well, one better know the maths and physics, because that’s how we test the hypotheses. And someone who does that is generally called an astrophysicist.

Of course, the telescopes and detectors don’t create themselves. We need engineers to design and build them and technicians touse them. Most astronomers don’t actually use thetelescopes themselves anymore; someone who’s trained in their specific use does that forthem. Some of those instruments go into space, andsome go to other worlds, like the moon and Mars. We need astronomers and engineers andsoftware programmers who can build those, too. And then, at the end of all this, we need people to tell you all about it. Teachers, professors, writers, video makers, even artists. So they'll tell you what: If you have an interestin the Universe, if you love to look up at the stars, if you crave to understand what’s going on literally over your head, then who am I to say you’re not an astronomer?

However you define astronomy, humans have been looking up at the sky for as long as we’ve been humans. Certainly ancient people noticed the big glowy ball in the sky, and how it lit everything up while it was up, and how it got dark when it was gone. The other, fainter glowy thing tried, but wasn’t quite as good as lighting up the night. They probably took that sort of thing pretty seriously. They probably also noticed that when certain stars appeared in the sky, the weather started getting warmer and the days longer, and when other starswere seen, the weather would get colder and daytime shorten.

And when humans settled down, discovered agriculture,and started farming, noticing those patterns in the sky would have had an even greater impact. It told them when to plant seeds, and when to harvest. The cycles in the sky became pretty important. So important that it wasn’t hard to imagine gods up there, looking down on us weak andridiculous humans, interfering with our lives. Surely if the stars tell us when to plant,and control the weather, seasons, and the length of the day, they control our lives too… and astrology was born. Astrology literally means “study of the stars”; as a word it’s been used before science became a formal method of studying nature. It irks a bit, since it got the good name, and now we’re stuck with “astronomy,”which means “law or culture of the stars." That’s not really what it is!

Solar Eclipse 2020

Annular Solar Eclipse!

2020

A solar eclipse occurs when a portion of the Earth is engulfed in a shadow cast by the Moon which fully or partially blocks sunlight. This occurs when the Sun, Moon and Earth are aligned in a straight line. Such alignment coincides with a new moon indicating the Moon is closest to the ecliptic plane. In a total eclipse, the disk of the Sun is fully covered by the Moon. In partial and annular eclipses, only part of the Sun is obscured.

An annular solar eclipse – now often called a ring of fire eclipse – caught by Geoff Sims on May 10, 2013. Like a total solar eclipse, an annular solar eclipse happens when the new moon moves directly in front of the sun. During a total solar eclipse, the new moon completely covers over the solar disk.

The annular solar eclipse will see the Sun, Moon and Earth align on Sunday, 21 June, creating a spectacular effect for sky gazers to witness across large parts of the world.

The annular eclipse will first start for the people of Congo in Africa and progress through South Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the Indian Ocean and Pakistan, before entering India over Rajasthan. It will then move on to Tibet, China, Taiwan, before ending at the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The Moon will be at its furthest stage of its orbit around the Earth, known as its apogee, meaning it'll appear slightly smaller in the sky. This means it'll not able to completely block out the Sun, thus creating the "Ring of Fire ".

⚠️Precautions⚠️

✔️ Do not look at the eclipse with naked eyes as it can cause serious eye damage

✔️ Never look at the sun through unfiltered telescope, binoculars, cameras or other optical devices

✔️ Use protective eye gear/solar viewing glasses/eclipse glasses; If you normally wear eyeglasses, keep them on & wear the eclipse glasses over them

Alien Base in India

Kongka la pass

India's Area51

All of you must have heard of Area 51 or the Nevada's Mystery or the Nevada Airbase. You might be surprised there exists such a place in India too. India's own Area 51. This place exists somewhere in Himalayan mountains near Aksai Chin on the India-china border.

Kongka La is the low peak region in the Himalayas. It is in the dispution on India-China border area in Ladakh. The northeastern part held by China is known as Aksai Chin and South Western part is known as Ladakh. Aksai Chin is a region where Eurasian and Indian plates have created convergent plate boundaries where a plate dives under the other and thus it is among the few areas in the world where the depth of the crust is twice as much as in the other places in the world.This the area where Indian and Chinese armies fought the major war in 1962. The area is among the least accessed areas in the world and by an agreement between the two countries there is no patrol in this part of the border.

According to many tourists, Buddhist monks and the native people in the region, the Indian Army and the Chinese Military maintains the line of control. But there is something much more serious happening in the area. A few local people on the Indian and Chinese sides, this is the place where UFOs are seen coming out of the ground frequently. Some believe, there are some underground UFO bases in the region and both the Indian and Chinese Government know this very well.

Recently, some Hindu pilgrims were on their way to Mount Kailash by the western pass and they encountered some strange lights in the sky. When a local guides while in the Chinese territory told them that this kind of incidents are common in tha area and there was nothing new, its a normal phenomenon in Kongka Pass area - a tensed border region between India and China. This strange lighted triangular silent aircraft show up from underground and moves almost vertically up.

When some adventurous tourists wanted to look into the site. They were first turned back by the Chinese guard posts as they were refused entry from the Chinese side.
When they tried to approach from the Indian side, the Indian border patrol also turned them down inspite of their permit to travel between the two countries. Natives from both sides of the border claims the existane of an underground UFO base in this region with the knowledge of both the  countries' authority. Local guides and natives said that this kind of view is not something new and it is a very common sight in Kongka La pass.

This theory is  credenced by the fact that in June of 2006, a satellite imaging on Google Earth revealed a 1:500 scale detailed terrain model of this region in question on the Chinese side of the border. The model is surrounded by buildings similar to a military facility. According to the claimants extra-terrestrial presence is well known and it is in deeps of the ground. They believe neither the Indian nor Chinese Government want to expose the fact of these sightings for some reason. When this matter is put forward by the natives and they were told by the government authorities to keep quite and call them rumers.

Alien Base in Nevada

Area 51

Nevada Airbase

The nevada airbase aka the Area 51 has a great history of UFO sightings and a lot of citizens in the area hace claimed the area to be related with alien operations. Many believe it to be a base for alien activities on the Earth.Many claim that it is a place where the American Government here research and investigate about on the aliens and alien equipments. But there are no solid proof of any kind of activities and the government has always claimed these claims to be just flukes and rumers. 

Here are the sequence of  encounters and claims of different individuals and groups about Area 51 during the first 20 years of the Area 51

Timeline:

April 12, 1955 -

 CIA officer Richard Bissell, who is overseeing the development of the U-2 plane, first sees the site that would become known as Area 51 while on an "aerial scouting mission." Bissell, along with three others, including Col. Osmund Ritland and Kelly Johnson, Director of the Lockheed Corporation's Skunk Works, agree that the area would "make an ideal site for testing the U-2 training pilots" and request the Atomic Energy Commission add the area to its real estate holdings in Nevada.

July 1955 -

 The CIA begins using Area 51 to develop the high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane. Other aircrafts are also tested at the site later, including the OXCART (a supersonic reconnaissance A-12 aircraft) and the F-117 stealth ground attack jet.

November 1959 -

  A radar test facility is established at Area 51.

October 13, 1961 -

 In a letter to Bissell, now the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans, by CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick writes that Area 51 appears to be "extremely vulnerable in its present security provisions against unauthorized observation."

December 22, 1961 - 

 The A-12 arrives at Area 51.

1974 -

 Skylab astronauts inadvertently take photographs of Area 51. The images are reviewed by the National Photographic Interpretation Center ("NPIC") and then removed from the rolls of film and stored in a restrictive vault.

August 26, 1976 - 

 In a memo from the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence E.H. Knoche to General David C. Jones, the Air Force chief of staff, the National Security Council's Committee on Foreign Intelligence approves the recommendation "that management of Area 51 be transferred from CIA to Air Force by fiscal year 1978."

Outer space Mission

Apollo 11

The first step into Forever

July 1969, Neil Armstrong's probably an ex-test pilot with a Boy Scout badge for spitting in the face of death, and on that day he find himself at Kennedy Space Center, wearing a spacesuit and about to board a strange machine. The machine is called "the Saturn 5 rocket", and is about three blue whales high, weighs about as much as thirty-five 737s, and very shortly, a million liters of liquid oxygen are going to mix with 700,000 liters of kerosene, and the machine is gonna go, and quite possibly KILL HIM DEAD! abd he hop in with your two other mates, strap up, and try to ignore the fact that you're about to ride the explosive equivalent of 400 tons of TNT up into the sky on the back of seven and a half million pounds of thrust. And sure enough, a system of valves open below him, mixing the liquid oxygen and kerosene, and are ignited. The cabin rocks left to right with the guidance computer gimballing the five gigantic F-1 engines 300 feet below him, desperately trying to stop you smashing into the launch tower. He is squashed back into his seat four times your normal weight. By 9:35 AM you're 42 miles high, riding 5% for America's federal budget into the morning sky. 

By 9:44 AM, the first two stages of the rocket are jettisoned, and you're 118 miles high. By 12:22 PM you're in orbit, going at 24,000 miles an hour – or, if you prefer, speeding around the Earth at about 17 times faster than a bullet. By 12:49, you get the word he'll go for trans-lunar injection. A few minutes of engine burn later, and he's now headed out of Earth orbit. He blow the bolts connecting the two sections of your rocket ship, separating his module from the lunar module, spin them around and dock again. The Earth begins to recede behind him. By 2:45 PM, he is now riding 26 tons of food, instruments, and science at about 25,000 miles an hour. He is the commander of Apollo 11. And while two NASA missions have orbited the Moon already, his will now attempt to be the first to land and stand on that alien world. Fun fact: peeing in zero gravity is a nightmare. To counteract this, since all Apollo astronauts were men, engineers developed a system whereby one would urinate into a condom attached to a hose. The condom sizes came in "small", "medium", and "large". Legend has it that some astronauts were choosing the large size based on pride, and some were making a mess because it wasn't the right size. Allegedly, NASA opted to rename the sizes "extra-large", "immense", and "unbelievable".Space exploration!

 Anyway, what is this big white thing you're flying towards? Where did it come from? Well, no one knows for sure yet. The leading theory is that about four billion years ago something about the size of Mars – a planet we've called Theia – hit the Earth, and bits of the Earth came off, and eventually collected together into old Moonface McGee itself. Which is about 81 times lighter than the Earth, about ⅓ the diameter – bigger than Pluto, by the way, but most things are – and its gravity is around ⅙ ours. It takes the Moon 27 days to orbit us properly, but it also takes the Moon 27 days to turn once on its axis, which means we only ever see one side of the Moon. The reason the moon looks different to us through the month is its position relative to the Sun. As she swings around us, she's either between us and the Sun, called "new moon", waxes into the first quarter, then full, wanes into third quarter, and back to new. And moons in our solar system aren't unique at all: Mars has 2, Neptune has 14, Saturn has 82, but we are the only planet in our solar system with one moon, weirdly, and it is by far the largest, relative to its planet. No good explanation for any of that yet, but boy, are we glad its here! It kindly regulates the tides and stops us wobbling on our axis. All in all, very pretty, very mysterious.

 And would you look at that – he is almost there. Well, about 33,000 miles away, but you've entered the Moon's sphere of influence. That means the Moon has more gravitational power over you than the Earth does. He is  in its house now. Out the window and below is a barren expanse, a visual history of great violence: craters where comets hit, some as wide as 175 kilometers in diameter. one astronaut stays in the command module, while he and his colleague transfer to the lunar module. And before he know it, he's separated and descending to the surface.

 Ancient and dead volcanoes have covered the Moon in 23 of what our ancestors mistook for "maria" – Latin for "seas", as we still call them today. the Sea of Crises, the Eastern Sea, and there, our destination – the Sea of Tranquility. But he's traveling too fast for some reason, and overshooting the landing spot. Still, he'd come all this way, and you'll be damned if you quit here. 6,000 feet above now, alarms go off: 1201 and 1202. No one back on Earth is sure what that even means, but they advise him to carry on with the descent. Beside him, his co-pilot calls out the altitude. He's now coming down on the southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility, but there are boulders the size of trucks everywhere – no sign of flat. He can't land here. He take over manual control, desperately looking for a smooth area to set down, the biometric sensors reading your heart rate at 156 beats per minute.and  fuel is dribbling away. 

If he can't find a safe spot, he have to abort the entire mission. 150 feet, 75 dropping still, then a dust cloud kicks up beneath him – five feet, two, one and a half, one, and his co-pilot calls contact light, and with a jolt and only 15 seconds of fuel left... You're down. And he said... "Tranquility Base here, The Eagle has landed." The schedule calls for the two of them to sleep, but you're the first humans to visit the Moon, for God's sake. During this time, his co-pilot takes Holy Communion, though does it on the quiet: NASA is currently engaged in a lawsuit with an atheist who had objections to a previous mission orbiting the Moon, and reading from the Bible as it did so. Then, at 2:39 AM, you open the hatch and slowly descend the ladder. He pull a lever, activating the camera already on the outside of the lunar module to witness what is about to come next. 

He reach the bottom of the ladder, still standing on the leg now. He observe the surface of the Moon is granular, almost like powder. He uncover a plaque on the lunar module, saying: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." Tentatively, he step back with his left foot onto the first celestial body humankind has ever visited. And having been allowed to choose those first words on a new world, you say: "That's one small step for  a man, one giant leap for mankind." Which will later be misquoted repeatedly without the indefinite article, as "One small step for man", Which makes no sense, if you think about it, because that would mean "one small step for Humanity, one giant leap for Humanity", but whatever – he's on the Moon. His colleague exits the lunar module, pausing on the ladder a few moments to become the first human ever to urinate while outside on the Moon, then joins him on the surface. 

He erect a United States flag and accept a call directly from your then-president Richard Nixon. The two of you experiment with transport methods, including kangaroo hops, he set up scientific equipment, he take photos, collect ground samples... But this picnic runs on oxygen. So, two and a half hours later after setting foot down here, the two of you climb the ladder again, and return to the lunar module, and attempt to sleep. You sleep – not very well, but... a little. It's time now to go home. They're both relying on a single ascent engine that can only be fired once, meaning one chance to leave. His colleague has somehow damaged the circuit breaker for the engine in the course of moving about. He jam a felt-tip pen in there, hoping that to your third colleague will be flying overhead shortly, waiting to rendezvous if all goes well. The ascent engine is fired, everything goes fine.

Some more knowledge and fun facts in the video . Must Watch