21st Century Skills InnovatIon LIbrary EMERGING T h e c Personal Space Travel Cherry Lake PubLishing ann arbor MiChigan by Martin Gitlin
EMERGING TeCh Chapter 1 The Final Frontier I magine you are living hundreds of years ago You gaze into the stars that light up the night sky You ponder the mysteries of the great unknown You think about soaring into space and making amazing discoveries You are not alone Throughout history people have dreamed about space travel Fictional space Long before space travel was possible people dreamed of exploring distant planets 44
The Soviet Sputnik 1 made history as the world’s first human-made satellite travelers entertained children and adults before real astronauts ever stepped aboard rocket ships Science fiction author Jules Verne wrote in 1865 about blasting passengers to the moon from a cannon A century later spacemen Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon captured the imaginations of kids in comic strips and on television By that time dreams of space were starting to come true Scientists began designing rocket engines in the early 1900s Germany used long-range rockets to batter England in an attempt to escape defeat in 5
