S08:E03, “Spaceflight before NASA” Edition, with Amy Shira Teitel, (video)

Posted by jnshaumeyer on 28 December 2016

Streamed live on 8 September 2016.

NASA was created when the US Congress passed the “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958” and it was signed by President Eisenhower. It was the time of the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, and Sputnik, and American felt like it had “lost the space race” already. Soon enough the US launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

But before that happened, there was an interesting and exciting few decades of rocket research that made it all possible. In this episode of RS, Amy Shira Teitel, science historian and author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity : The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA, talked to us all about it. The stories were nearly ballistic and our time was over almost before we got launched.

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