Paper
Tough and competent.
Published Nov 1, 2015 · C. Munro, R. Savel
American journal of critical care : an official publication, American Association of Critical-Care Nurses
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Abstract
460 AJCC AMERICAN JOURNAL OF CRITICAL CARE, November 2015, Volume 24, No. 6 www.ajcconline.org I t was a Friday afternoon: January 27, 1967, to be precise. The United States and the Soviet Union were in the middle of the Cold War. As a part of this ideological standoff, these 2 superpowers were engaged in a heated space race—a race that the United States was losing. The Soviet Union had successfully launched the first artificial space satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957, and had beaten us by putting the first man in space, the first man in orbit, the first woman in space, and enabling the first person to perform a space walk. A visionary and bold response was articulated by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Later, in 1962, he expanded his remarks: “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” as well as the famous words “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard...”1 The United States had successfully completed Project Mercury,2 proving we could put a human into space, and Project Gemini,3 in which early American space pioneers (in a spacecraft just large enough to contain 2 people) demonstrated how to actually do the work of astronauts. Through trial, error, perseverance, and tachycardia, these men learned how to perform such tasks as working in space, navigating their spacecraft, and, of greatest complexity and importance, developing techniques to successfully rendezvous spacecraft with each other (mandatory for a successful moon landing), all with much less computing power than each of us now carry in our smartphones.
The US space program was a success, but it was not without its challenges.
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