Abstract
The penultimate period that we will tackle is the Space Age. For me, born in 1967, this still looms large as an age of exciting, grand achievements: landing humans on the Moon; the Space Shuttle; spacecraft sent to the outer reaches of the solar system. I still find it thrilling to read about the Apollo program, and the ingenuity with which NASA tackled multiple technological challenges using rudimentary digital computers and other equipment that seems almost laughably simplistic to a twenty-first-century eye.
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In fact, this story is unfair to the US. The fire that destroyed the Apollo I capsule and killed its crew during a test highlighted the dangers of using anything in the capsule that might cause possible electrical short circuits—i.e. particles of highly conductive graphite. This is why the US developed pens that could write in zero G.
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Cropley, D.H. (2019). The Space Age (1950–1981): The Science of Creativity. In: Homo Problematis Solvendis–Problem-solving Man. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3101-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3101-5_11
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