Abstract
For thousands of years, our ancestors have dreamed of leaving Earth and traveling to space. The Greeks told one of the first stories regarding a trip into the sky. As the tale goes, Icarus and his father Daedulus planned to escape imprisonment on the Island of Crete by fashioning wings of wax and feathers. Icarus and Daedulus were successful and flew into the sky on a bright sunny day. Icarus was so excited with this new freedom that he flew too close to the Sun and melted the wax that held his wings together. He fell into the sea and drowned (Figure 2.1).
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Phillips, R.W. (2012). The Long Road to Space Flight. In: Grappling with Gravity. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6899-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6899-9_2
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