An invention like a rocket is older than guns or guns. When gunpowder was invented in China, its main purpose was purely entertainment - rockets on the first powder were used to organize colorful pyrotechnic performances. Even in China, the homeland of this invention, it took almost three centuries before firecrackers and firecrackers found military use.
However, the new weapon was outperformed by competitors firing bullets or cannonballs. Attempts to use rockets for something more serious than fireworks were made for a very long time, but no one succeeded in achieving a good result.
Everything changed radically when, at the end of the 18th century, John Barber came up with the concept of a jet engine and received a patent for it. When physicists began to closely study Barber's design, they realized that there was something in this seemingly joking invention that could radically change the existing ways of traveling long distances.
With the appearance of the works of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who theoretically substantiated space flights, the idea of jet and rocket engines took on the form in which the implementation of the idea of space travel became more than real. And the process could no longer be stopped …
In less than fifty years, rocketry has evolved from a hobby of a handful of enthusiasts into a serious industry in which not only a lot of money was spinning, but in which governments of many leading powers showed interest. Naturally, among the customers in the forefront were the military - guided and unguided rockets represented a serious argument in military affairs, devoid of the drawbacks of conventional bombs or shells. At that time, few people thought about space flights or any other peaceful ways of using rockets - mostly, they were seen as purely military use.
However, the ideas of breaking away from the Earth, getting rid of the fetters of its gravity, excited the minds of scientists. Werner von Braun, Sergei Korolev, Friedrich Zander and many others - all these people, working for the military-industrial complexes of their countries, strove to start implementing the main business of their lives as soon as possible: the withdrawal of mankind into space.
But the desires of scientists and designers did not always coincide with the opinion of the management. Many of their projects were either frozen or classified to such an extent that sometimes it was not even possible to expand the scientific staff or discuss a particular problem in a wide range of specialists. And the participants in the "rocket" projects themselves were carefully hiding, behind their safety and the safety of their work there were thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands of intelligence officers.
Even when space programs became more accessible and open, many of the secrets of space exploration remained a "seven sealed secret." The leading space powers - the USSR and the United States - hid information not only from a potential enemy, but also often from their own citizens.
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The secrecy concerned everything: not only the implementation of specific devices or entire complexes, but also, often, even scientific directions or locations of certain objects. For example, the Americans hid the fact of Von Braun's work for them for more than 7 years, and in the Soviet Union the secrecy was quite total; the fact of the existence of two cosmodromes - in Plesetsk and Kapustin Yar - was hidden for more than 20 years.
This secrecy has given rise to many rumors and speculation, which over time passed into the status of "modern legends." Until now, many believe that the first cosmonaut was not Yuri Gagarin, but Alexander Ledovsky, who allegedly died during the launch of the first manned spacecraft in 1957. Fans of creepy stories add some variety to the story - they say, Ledovsky was deliberately launched into space without the possibility of returning back, and the astronaut died in orbit, cursing on the radio all who sent him to certain death.
Only in the late 80s of the last century the facts of many failures of both Soviet and American astronautics were revealed. In October 1960, due to an error in the control system, a fire broke out in Baikonur, as a result of which more than 120 people died. Twenty years later, a similar accident occurred in the very secret cosmodrome in Plesetsk, where about 80 people died. And one should not think that the silence of such facts was peculiar only to the USSR; Americans, too, did not say much about their failures. Titan ICBMs have exploded twice at the same location on the launch pads, killing dozens of people.
A separate area of mystery in space exploration is the exploration of the moon. Despite the fact that the fact that the Americans visited a satellite of our planet has long been proven, here and there new and new theories of the supporters of the "lunar conspiracy" appear, claiming that the entire Apollo program is a well-planned hoax, to which they are not involved only the USA and the USSR, and some other countries. And no amount of evidence - neither tens of kilograms of lunar soil, nor photographs of landing sites from space, nor laser prisms left on the moon can shake the stubbornness of skeptics. Maybe it's more convenient for these people to live this way? Perhaps, without realizing that “they are hiding something from us,” their life will be more dull?
More than 40 years have passed since the beginning of the space age before the fact reached humanity that it is easier to explore space together than separately. The colossal experience of the participants in all the "space races" led to the fact that on November 20, 1998, the first truly multinational program of the International Space Station was launched. The project turned out to be so promising that it has existed for almost 20 years. This experience perfectly confirms the idea of the profitability of joint space exploration.
Perhaps, in the future, the development of near-earth space will help humanity to overcome internal strife and unite into a single nation for the great goal of conquering the Galaxy.