EDITORIAL: An awesome achievement (07/25/99)

EDITORIAL

An awesome achievement

The 30th anniversary of man's landing on the moon on July 20, 1969, was not only a wonderful day of celebration for the United States, but also a vivid reminder of the dramatic changes - technological, political, economic - through which we have lived in less than a generation. In 1957, when the USSR successfully launched the Sputnik 1 satellite, a stunned America kicked into gear to beat the Soviets to the moon. But unlike the U.S.-USSR arms race, also a product of the Cold War, the space race has left us with an enthusiastic and positive memory.

Unlike in 1957, by 1969 most Americans owned television sets, and millions of families sat mesmerized in front of their TV screens watching the Apollo 11 manned lunar module descend towards the surface of the moon. Across the country children were allowed to stay up late to watch the big moment. Those who fell asleep awoke to a simultaneous nationwide cheer as Neil Armstrong made his "giant leap for mankind."

Man's first walk on the moon was a tremendous achievement - the result of centuries of dreams and decades of technological preparation. Just in the decade prior to Apollo 11, the USSR and the United States sent up more than 50 manned and unmanned rockets and satellites to take photographs, test equipment and attempt lunar landings.

Many Ukrainian Americans worked as engineers, designers, chemists, biologists, doctors, physicists and mathematicians in the wide-ranging U.S. space program. The space program was one of the major factors to shape the Ukrainian American community in Washington in the 1960s, as a large influx of young Ukrainian American scientists came to the capital city and joined the federal government's effort to meet President John F. Kennedy's challenge "to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of this decade."

As Col. Leonid Kadenyuk, independent Ukraine's first cosmonaut, and Dr. Yaroslav Pustovyi, his alternate, noted during their tour of Ukrainian American communities in 1998, "Ukraine and the cosmos have always been connected." Three Ukrainians in particular, they mentioned, have made immeasurable contributions to space exploration: Mykola Kybalchych (1853-1881), an inventor who developed the idea of jet propulsion and whose designs of rocket-propelled aircraft are the first recorded proposal of its kind; Yurii Kondratiuk (1897-1941/42), a scientist, inventor, and pioneer in rocketry and space technology who first articulated the concept of multi-stage rockets as a method by which to travel to the moon and to the planets; and Serhii Korolov (1907-1966), a highly acclaimed aeronautical engineer who designed the first Soviet guided missiles and spacecraft and the acknowledged mastermind behind the Soviet drive to beat the United States in putting a man on the moon.

Ukraine continues to be involved in ventures in space, participating in Sea Launch, a joint effort by Norway, Russia, Ukraine and the United States to launch commercial satellites from a floating platform - a converted oil drilling platform - in the Pacific Ocean. Engineers and designers at Ukraine's Pivdenmash rocket facility in Dnipropetrovsk, the premier rocket-building facility for the USSR's space and arms race, designed and built the rockets that will be used in the project.

For the future, Ukraine plans to build one of the research modules for the International Space Station, a project headed by NASA, but one that also includes Canada, Russia, the European Space Agency and Brazil. Ukraine also builds the Cyclone rocket, planned for commercial use.

In a very quick three decades since Apollo 11 made history, the Soviet Union has collapsed, millions of American have abandoned their TV screens for computer screens, and former astronauts blithely speak of "space tourism" - yet nobody even raises an eyebrow. Nonetheless, those grainy black and white images from man's first steps on the moon still inspire awe. Congratulations to all those who helped the Eagle land!

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