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Part I. Background
Chapter 1. History of space exploration
The history Since the beginning of time, people looked up into the starry night and wondered what is up there. Their feelings about this strange space above their heads were constantly changing: fear, adoration, incomprehension, a myriad of other things. But one feeling was always there. The one that, some people believe, was incorporated in our nature. The desire to know, to learn, to explore has brought us not only to the farthest places on Earth but to space, far above our planet. There grew up already a few generations of people who did not know the world without space missions like my grandparents. In my lifetime, I do not remember a time without seeing the International Space Station on the news, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. It has been part of our daily life. We cannot imagine not going to space anymore, can we? And all of that was and is happening because of one feeling. Curiosity was not just about the rover – it was about its creators, people. Current plans of humanity on space exploration are strictly focused on one particular destination. We aim to Mars, the red planet, and we have never been so close to it. The dream of the first people developing rockets – soviet physicist and rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and German-born NASA aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun – was actually multiplanetary traveling. The Moon was planned to be only a small step in between. But with the end of the cold war, the space race ended too, and so these bright minds could not
