Perhaps there should have been a cold war. Without it, many of the things that we use everyday would not be in existence. There would be no global communications, but most importantly there would have been no space-race. The war between the Soviet Union and the United States was one with virtually no casualties. There were many technological advances in a feud between two countries. However, there were some failures as well. Some Americans gave their lives for the sake of social movement, not to mention some of the botched missions costing the American public millions to billions of dollars. On the other hand, it is believed that for every dollar that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spends, there is a six dollar return in the government system.
             The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officially began its operations on October 1, 1958. It had an annual budget of $100 million, and employed 8,000 people. NASA had inherited the organization before it, the National Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and a few other governmental organizations. NASA's inception sparked a melee of achievements in almost all scientific fields. Almost immediately after NASA was founded, it had begun working on options for human flight outside of the Earth's atmosphere. The first publicized project was dubbed Project Mercury. Its primary purpose was to see if humans could survive a trip into space. Gemini, the following project that was built on the successes of Mercury, used a spacecraft designed to carry to astronauts.
             Catastrophe Strikes on January 27, 1967. At that time, during a routine simulation aboard one of the Apollo spacecraft, a flash fire broke out in a pure oxygen atmosphere. Flames engulfed the lunar capsule, and the three astronauts aboard, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, died of asphyxiation. These were the first deaths directly attributed to the U.S. space program. T...