Reaching the Heavens

Space – the so-called “final frontier” or the “new ocean” – has been beckoning humans since ancient times. Our ancestors looked to the heavens and saw their Gods as bright sparking pin-picks of light in the night sky. By day, the position of the Sun was often used for ceremonies and worship rituals as it moved across the sky. The changing face of the Moon, the occasional blocking of the sunlight and the move­ments of some of those small speckles of light all frightened and intrigued our forebears for thousands of years.

In the first four hundred years or so of the second millennium ad, our under­standing of the heavens, planets, stars, moons and “space” began to grow, and while our interpretations were often wrong, or were subjugated to the religious beliefs of the day, developments in scientific instrumentation, medical advances, engineering cap­abilities, industrial processes and human curiosity began to focus on what lay beyond the confines of our own world. Fanciful stories were conceived and published, weird and wonderful machines proposed, and myths and monsters imagined.

In the twentieth century, the development of flight and research into rocketry gradually opened up the possibility of exploring the void of space. Advances in miniaturisation, computation, medicine, pressurised chambers and life support sys­tems to explore the upper atmosphere and deepest oceans were the stepping stones to get there. But the driving force behind the final stage would be the military, at least at first. The desire for supremacy over a rival superpower was the catalyst behind our first tentative steps into the “new ocean”. Eventually, what had started as a race became a team event, a combination of what both sides had learned – sometimes at painful and tragic cost – into a new era of understanding and exploration.