The area outside the Earth’s atmosphere is known as space. It is in space that all planets stars, nebula and other heavenly bodies exist. Human beings, curious in nature are by instinct obliged to explore, to know any unknown. In this urge to explore and find out about space, the foundations of space exploration were laid out. Space exploration means the finding out more about the mysterious space.
No one knows exactly when man started to dream about exploring space but it was only in the year 1957 A.D that space exploration began with the successful launch of Sputnik 1 by the former Soviet Union. Four years later, in1961 A.D., Yuri Gagarin, a Russian became the first man in space. Again in 1969A.D mankind took another giant leap’ in space exploration by setting foot on the moon.
Space exploration fulfills a great deal of human curiosity but apart from that there are other objectives of space exploration too. Searching for extraterrestrial life, study of planets and space inhabitation are few of these objectives. Till date, many space flights have been launched, some successful and some no, the earth is being orbited by artificial satellites and probes have been sent to the Moon, Mars and other planets. This is a huge accomplishment in space exploration for human beings but because the Universe is so vast the knowledge we have gained so far is very less.
Space exploration has helped us gain a considerable amount of knowledge about the solar system and even beyond. It has also helped stimulate a new array of technologies that will help us in fields other than space exploration.
Like any other type of exploration, tools are necessarily required. Apart from that a specialized expertise and a spacecraft with all equipments would also be required. The fuelling of the spacecraft is till now mostly limited to chemical fuelling, but researchers seem promising about new technologies like Jet Propulsion, etc.
Space exploration is in fact moving forward at a fast pace, new technologies for space exploration are emerging and space exploration is taking new leaps all the time. Today space explorations mostly limited to unmanned spacecrafts but it is expected that soon manned flights will be taking place with ease.
With all these large organizations based on space, like NASA, and huge budgets to empower them we can rest assured that the vast space will be one day conquered and that we will have an enormous amount of knowledge about it.
