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Today,
we watch color images of manmade probes exploring the extraterrestrial
soils of other planets. Tomorrow man will replace the six-wheel robotic
rover and make another giant leap for mankind. But long ago, when
today was tomorrow, man's "dream" still propelled him to explore the
cosmos. Chinese, Babylonian, Egyptian, and other ancient cultures,
all studied astronomy, and no doubt carried the dream that is manifest
in the human spirit. In 1865, Jules Verne published his novel, From
the Earth to the Moon, a twentieth-century status report of this dream.
This dream, countlessly sustained through the generations, is dynamic,
yet it can be explained and defined as the product of five thousand years
of technological development and the idea. Why do we explore space;
a place so dark and foreign in the night sky? This question is too
deep to be fully developed here (see Issues on Space Exploration), and
a more quantified technological approach will ensue as the content of this
time line. The ancient Chinese had once fastened a myriad of small
rockets to a wooden chair, where they positioned their emperor. And
in their attempt to reach the heavens, the chair (and their emperor) disappeared
in a cloud of fire and smoke. In 1961, a Mercury rocket propelled
Freedom 7, with Allan B. Shepard, to an altitude of 117 miles. These
two occasions, the Chinese rocket chair and the Mercury Space program are
the parts of the same dream, except for the technology variable. This
timeline will provide a definition for the technology variable, as it has
developed over the last five thousand years. Tomorrow will always
continue to transform into today, as man sets out to explore and bring his
torch to the "billions and billions" of stars, and galaxies beyond our
current perception, deep within the darkness of the cosmos.
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