• Question: how many year is there of space development

    Asked by jman2641999 to Arlene, Colin, David, Eugene, Paul on 13 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: David McKeown

      David McKeown answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      Good question

      Depends on what you mean by space development, if you mean putting satellites and people up into space well then the big players were the Soviet Union who started their space agency in 1955 (and launched the first satellite in 1957) and United states who started (NASA) in 1958.

      But people have been looking at the sky and figuring things out from WAY before then. A good starting point for when things started to get on a good scientific grounding would be the publication of Copernicus’ major theories on planetary motion in 1543.

    • Photo: Paul Higgins

      Paul Higgins answered on 13 Nov 2012:

      I suppose space development was driven by the cold war- the americans didn’t want the russians to control space, and vice versa, so they started buying up real estate, so to speak. Now space is predominantly a commercial venture- TV, communication, radio broadcasts, and soon: space tourism. I’d say it will only increase in the future. And society is becoming more vulnerable to solar storms interfering with satellites, so there are going to be a lot more jobs for space operations people and space researchers.

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