Space exploration is an interesting topic for any age. You do not need to be an expert to understand that rockets and satellites are powerful, and they involve a lot of science and mathematics behind them. There are many levels of this, for this reason, you can build your own with basic concepts from physics, while you can build another one with a lot of knowledge in electronics, programming, propulsion and aerodynamics. Just putting your theoretical knowledge into practice is a good start.
Stories of interplanetary travels are as old as flight itself. As early as 100 A.D. Lucian of Samosata, satirist, wrote about a ship which was blown to the moon by a storm. Another story happened with Wan Hoo, a chinese man who built a rocket vehicle about 1500 A.D. with unknown results. Wan Hoo fixed two large kites to a framework, attached 47 gunpowder rockets and placed a saddle in the center. After when he sat, 47 people with torch lit the rockets and Wan Hoo disappeared. Also, Jules Verne wrote a science fiction novel in 1865, De la Terre a la Lune, about of a spacecraft prophetically launched from Florida that was controlled in space by rockets (Blumenfeld).
Although these stories, there are scientific studies as well. For example, Konstantin E. Ziolkovsky, the father of Russian space exploration, wrote a paper in 1898 suggesting that would be possible to build a rocket that escape of the earth's gravity through use of liquid fuel mixed with liquid oxygen as a propellant (Blumenfeld). In 1914 until World War II, an American physicist called Robert H. Goddard conducted extensive research on rockets with the principal objective to exploration of the atmosphere. He conducted the first successful test of a liquid-fuel rocket in 1926 and he calculated the size of a rocket engine that would be capable of going to the moon (Blumenfeld). However, all the efforts of Goddard and other rocket enthusiasts went largely unnoticed. Meanwhile, Hermann Oberth published an important work in Germany in 1928—The Rocket into Interplanetary Space—that envisioned unmanned instrument carriers, manned spaceships and manned space stations.
Rocket studies in Germany eventually won government support. On the eve of World War II, the government was spending one-third of its entire aerodynamic research budget on a rocket base at Peenemunde. The V-1 and V-2 rockets that were sent against England in 1944 were made there. So the German rockets marked an advance in technology and established the possibility of future space flight (Blumenfeld). After the war, German and American scientists worked together (most known as Operation Paperclip) and they initiated an intensive studies using the V-2 rocket as primordial base and they created Viking II, which was launched in May 1954 with 158 miles in altitude (Blumenfeld). In 1957, the Naval Research Laboratory in the United States created Vanguard consisting of three rocket stages with a total weight of a little over 10 tons.
The first satellite was Sputnik 1 from Russia in 1957, while the first American satellite launching was Explorer in 1958. The Explorer was credited with the discovery of a global radiation belt, identified by and named for James A. Van Allen, who was the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in this time. This global radiation belt is a zone of energetic particles, most of which originate from the solar wind that are captured by and held around a planet because of the planet's magnetic field.
The satellites have saved many information on radiation levels, cosmic ray activity and frequency of low-energy particles (Blumenfeld). Pioneer V, launched into solar orbit on March 1960, for example, was tracked into space a distance of 22.5 million miles, the greatest distance any object has been tracked. According to Herbert Friedman, superintendent of the Astrophysics and Atmosphere Division of the Naval Research Laboratory, an Aerobee-Hi rocket shot on August 1960 virtually doubled the accumulated data on solar radiation (Blumenfeld), but much more exploration of radiation in outer space was considered necessary in preparation for a manned flight to the moon.
The Project Mercury was made by the United States to place a manned space capsule in orbital flight around the earth got under way in October 1958 (Blumenfeld). The reason was to get more information for the next time to send a living being, because the russians sent for the first time a dog named Laika in November 1957 to the space. Now, in January 1959 Mercury-Redstone missile raised a chimpanzee to an altitude of 156 miles while traveling downrange about 420 miles.
The first American space exploration to the moon is hard to forget and it is still interesting nowadays. It happened four years after Sputnik 1 and the rocket program of the United States desired to a challenge to go beyond and also because President Kennedy’s support of the nation to launch a manned expedition to the moon before the end of the decade. James E. Webb said that no nation had rockets capable of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely, for this reason, the United States could focus on this to win the race with the Soviet Union (Blumenfeld). Consequently, the President's decision to marshal the resources required for leadership in space had three basic objectives: to encourage the quest for scientific knowledge; to acquire new knowledge to speed the development of satellite systems for communications, weather forecasting and navigation; and to reap the benefits of the technological advances and stimulus to the economy that will emerge from the space effort (Blumenfeld). It was crucial to the country's growth in being one of the best in the world in many ways --all because of investing in knowledge to produce technology.
Despite of the instrumented satellites cannot make repairs, they also lack the flexibility of human reasoning and just one person outstrips any computer in his ability to make emergency decisions, it means that sending a person to space has good points. Finally, there is recognition that manned flight in space has a much greater psychological impact on people everywhere than anything. The United States, as well as the Soviet Union, was aware of the importance of that impact (Blumenfeld). This is because by going to space someone could talk about their experience, if there was any problem, if there was any situation different from what was planned, in other words, the whole experience about travelling to the moon and how was the feeling.
The cost of sending someone to the moon and back to earth added about $7 billion to $9 billion to the country's expenditures for space exploration for the next five years. In brief, almost 20 times the cost of the Manhattan, A-bomb project of World War II (Blumenfeld). Nasa's budget was for research and development of propulsion systems, propellants, power supplies, structures and materials, guidance and control, telemetry, aerodynamics, launch vehicles, and the satellite program. The main items were for research and development for Project Apollo (an attempt to develop a three-man spacecraft to circle the moon); to design and development of the huge Nova rocket (which focus was to propel future space vehicles to the moon and to develop test and launch facilities for this rocket); and in the end, to develop the F-1 liquid hydrogen engine to propel the Nova rocket (Blumenfeld). It was a good time to partner with industries that involved electronics, communication systems, mechanics and chemistry, because these areas of industries also wanted to be part of this revolution. Moreover, some steps have been taken to give Nasa a new management and reorganization within its own ranks to run the most complex and costly undertaking in history (Blumenfeld).
In conclusion, there were a lot of investment and effort for this launchment. All of this happened before the Neil Amstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon. It was interesting the whole process of studies, tests, technological growth until Apollo 11. It was one of the most awaited (and beautiful!) lauchments by Americans, and of course, it had a great result which influences researchers (from the whole world) until today.