Man
cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage
to
lose sight of the shore. (Andrew Gide)
Exploration
awaits you, said Leonard Nimoy.
Not
mapping stars and studying nebula,
but
in charting the unknown possibilities of existence.
“In
wisdom gathered over time, I have found that every experience
is a form of exploration.” (Ansel Adams)
The
Kon Tiki Expedition
In
1947 Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian explorer and writer led a journey by
raft from South America to the Polynesia Islands. The raft was named
Kon Tiki after
the Inca sungod, Viracho. Heyerdahl believed that the people from
South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times.
The Kon Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with
donations of equipment from the U.S. Navy.
Heyerdahl
and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard
facilities, they constructed the raft out of
balsa logs
and other native materials, an indigenous style as recorded in
illustrations by the Spanish conquistadors. Beginning on April 28,
1947, Heyerdahl and 5 companions sailed the raft for 101 days over
6,900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into
a reef at Rarola in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. The crew
made successful land, returning safely.
Thor
Heyerdahl's book about his experience became a
'best-seller'...published in Norwegian in 1948 as The
Kon Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas,
was later reprinted as Kon-Tiki:
Across the Pacific on a Raft
in English in 1950...also in many other languages. A documentary
motion picture about the expedition, also called Kon-Tiki
was
produced, winning an Academy Award (directed by Thor Hayerdahl).
I'm a storyteller: that's what exploration really is all about.
Going to places where others haven't been and return to tell a
story
that hadn't been heard before. (James Cameron)
Spanish Exploration of the Pacific
In
1521, Ferdinand Magellan's expedition was the first known crossing of
the Pacific Ocean, who then named it the 'peaceful
sea'. Born
into a wealthy Portuguese family (in around 1480), Magellan became a
skilled sailor and naval officer and was eventually selected by King
Charles I of Spain to search for a western route to the Maluka
Islands (the
Spice Islands). Commanding a fleet of vessels, he headed south
through the Atlantic Ocean to Patagonia, passing through the Strait
of Magellan into a body of water he named the 'peaceful
sea' (the
modern Pacific Ocean).
Despite a series of storms and mutinies, the expedition reached the
Spice Islands in 1521...and returned home via the Indian Ocean to
complete the first circuit of the globe. Magellan did not complete
the entire voyage, as he was killed during the Battle of Mactan in
the Philippines in 1521.
The
“Megellan
Penguin” is
named after him
as he was the first European to note it.
Ferdinand Magellan's navigational skills have also been acknowledged
by
the naming of objects associated with the stars...including the
'Megellan
Clouds'...
now
known to be two nearby dwarf
galaxies.
Space Exploration
Do You Star Gaze? Who Hasn't?
The
Tau Zero Foundation is a global
volunteer group of scientists, engineers, writers, entrepreneurs and
writers
working together to advance the goal of interstellar
flight.
Why Do We Go to Outer Space? We live in a world so full of social
injustice...of problems, of poverty and disease. Is it worth
spending even one dollar up there when there is suffering and pain on
Earth?
Did
You Know? Virgin
Galactic has
already sold tickets to space to more people than have ever gone
before. Waiting for their time when they step on that spaceship and
fulfil their childhood dream and go to space, are 650 peole who have
paid up. (One such traveller is a female journalist from Burlington,
Ontario.) This stuff is really, really close on the horizon.
Space
Exploration is the ongoing discovery
and explanation of celestial structures in outer space
by means of continuously evolving and growing space technology.
Carried out mainly by astronomers
with telescopes,
the physical exploration of space is conducted both by unmanned
robotic
probes and human spaceflight.
Way
Back When...I
was in public school, we had to give a 10-minute talk to our class on
any given subject listed by the classroom teacher. Being extremely
shy and of low-esteem, I was dreading this presentation.
Fortunately, in a magazine was a fictional
account with several cartoon-like-drawings entitled...A
Trip to the Moon.
Pure Fantasy at that time! My mother and I redrew these
'cartoon-like drawings' with colour and mounted them onto sizeable
12” x 16” bristol board showcards. These, when displayed to my
classmates, were my 'crutches' to get through the presentation.
No
one at that time would have believed such Space Travel would ever
occur!!!
In later years, a Space
Race between the Soviet
Union and United States evolved. The launch of the first human-made
object to orbit Earth...the Soviet Union's Sputnik
1 on 4 October 1957 and
the first Moon Landing by the American Apollo
11 mission on 20 July
1969 are often taken as landmarks for this initial space exploration
period.
Landing a Man on the Moon and
returning him safely to Earth
within a decade, was a national
goal set by John F. Kennedy in 1961.
On 20 July 1969, Astronaut Neil
Armstrong 'took a
giant step for mankind'
as he stepped onto the moon's
surface. Six Apollo missions were made
to explore the moon between 1969
and 1972.
After 20 years of exploration, the
focus shifted to the Space Shuttle Program,
from competition to co-operation as
with the International Space Statioon (ISS).
* * * * * * *
The
day we stop exploring is the day we commit ourselves
to
live in a stagnant world, devoid of curiosity, empty of dreams.
(Neil
deGrasse Tyson)
Written
by Merle Baird-Kerr...November 6, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment