The Mars Generation Page #3

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including our eggstronaut,

are safe and reliable.

[Raj] No, no, no.

That means we have 250 left.

-[Josh] And then we have 150--

-[Raj] 150 left.

[Josh] And then we just used 100

for the motor tube. So we would have 50.

[Raj] In our engineering challenges,

we're assigned a budget for what we do

and you can't overspend it.

And sometimes

you don't even have enough to begin with.

Dude, we made a mistake

for the first item.

This 150 is actually 200.

So then now we're left with 100.

The money is a big constriction

for humans in real life.

So, they decided to make it

a constriction for us, too.

How much money have we spent?

Jace, I'm gonna go

glue these together, OK?

They put a limit on it to say,

"Hey, we're not gonna give you

all the materials,

because if we did

you could do so much."

[Raj] So the way these rocket engines work

is it propels downwards.

When we deploy it,

the parachute's gonna unfurl

and it's gonna float down like this.

And our egg's gonna survive.

Good stuff, guys!

This was a productive session.

[chatter from other groups]

[Josh] Ballin' till we drop!

[rocket lifting off]

[Kluger] The V2 rocket was built

by Wernher von Braun

and his team of engineers.

It hits randomly.

You don't really know what you're hitting,

what you're killing,

what you're destroying.

That was what the V2 did.

The "V", for goodness' sake,

stood for "Vengeance".

It was the weapon that resulted

from a tantrum,

in this case the tantrum of the fhrer.

He wanted to lash back,

as all losing causes do.

They flail at the end.

[announcement music]

[newscaster]

The President of the United States.

General Eisenhower informs me

that the forces of Germany

have surrendered to the United Nations.

The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.

[Jacobsen] At the end of World War II,

the Cold War had, in essence,

already begun.

It was clear to the Allies that

we could not coexist with the Soviets.

[siren]

If we didn't get von Braun,

then the Soviets would.

We had to have him.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson] Oh my gosh!

How soon we forget

how evil the communist empire

was perceived to be

in that day and in that time.

And how much of a motivating factor

that was to do anything we could

to not be bested by our arch enemy.

[Bolden] Not a lot of Americans

know that we took a...a Nazi,

someone who helped designed rockets

that were intended to kill us,

relocated him and his team

eventually to Huntsville, Alabama,

where they became founding fathers

of the spaceflight program.

[Jacobsen]

He became such a vocal figurehead

for space, for exploration,

for the red planet.

In the early to middle '50s,

von Braun became famous.

He began writing long magazine articles

about travel to the Moon and to Mars.

And he even signed a deal with Disney.

[von Braun with strong German accent] When

the day arrives for construction to begin,

the thousands of parts

for the space station

will be transported to the orbit

by our multistage rockets.

It's a real moment in American history

when 42 million Americans tune in

to watch von Braun talk

on a Disney television program

about space travel.

[von Braun] If we were to start today

on an organized

and well supported space program,

I believe a practical passenger rocket

could be built and tested within 10 years.

[beeping]

[newscaster]

Today, a new moon is in the sky,

a 23 inch metal sphere

placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.

500 miles up, the artificial moon

is boosted

to a speed counterbalancing

the pull of gravity,

and released.

[beeping]

The whole applecart was overturned

when the Russians put Sputnik into orbit,

causing a national nervous breakdown

as a consequence.

The Soviets had Sputnik up in the sky

and you could hear the beeping going by.

[beeping]

The entire country

was in shock by Sputnik.

[beeping continues]

[Nye] Sputnik orbited the Earth

on what you would say in military terms

was the ultimate high ground of space!

[sustained dramatic note]

[newscaster] The reaction was

one of astonishment and concern.

For it was now known

that a potential enemy

was at least temporarily ahead

in developing means for space travel.

We were scared to death

when Sputnik went up.

And then we were scared to death

when the Russians

beat us to orbit with a human.

[Nye] It seemed at once that

this competitive style of government

was producing technology faster,

outstripping the United States.

And so, a civilian space agency

was formed,

and that's the National Aeronautics

and Space Administration, NASA.

[dramatic music plays]

Welcome to

the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Our special task here in Huntsville

is to develop

the rocket powered systems necessary

to orbit man in an Earth satellite.

You might say

we are the long distance movers.

[Jacobsen] All effort was given

toward making sure

that America got into space pronto.

And that is where von Braun

began his ascent

as kind of the American space savior.

And from there, he became

the prophet of space exploration.

[cheering and applause]

For we meet

in an hour of change and challenge,

in a decade of hope and fear,

in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.

The greater our knowledge increases,

the greater our ignorance unfolds.

[Jacobsen]

When you think of the Apollo program,

when you think of man on the Moon,

no doubt von Braun

is a huge piece of JFK's legacy.

[JFK] The vast stretches of the unknown,

and the unanswered,

and the unfinished,

still far outstrip

our collective comprehension.

To be the first person on Mars,

it would definitely put you up there

with those big names

that most people know about space.

Alan Shepard, Yuri Gagarin,

Neil Armstrong, and von Braun.

It would definitely come

with a bit of infamy.

[JFK] Surely the opening vistas of space

promise high costs and hardships,

as well as high reward.

So, it is not surprising

that some would have us

stay where we are a little longer,

to rest, to wait.

To be sure, we are behind,

and will be behind for some time,

in manned flight.

But we do not intend to stay behind,

and in this decade

we shall make up and move ahead.

[Todd May] Building something from scratch

is a double-edged sword.

You can't design

a perfect launch vehicle from scratch

and put it up on the pad

the very first time

and expect things are gonna go well.

This generation does not intend

to founder in the backwash

of the coming age of space.

We mean to be a part of it.

We mean to lead it.

Since NASA was formed in 1958,

we've had a pretty small

number of different missions

that we've undertaken.

The first program was the Mercury program,

just to see if an astronaut

could survive in zero gravity.

This is Flagship 7,

radio loud and clear. Over.

[Dr. Don Thomas]

We went on to the Gemini program,

sending two astronauts up in a capsule.

We learned how to do

rendezvous and docking.

And we learned how to

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