ShmoopTube

00:00

by the 1950s humanity figured it only had one more place to go.

00:07

Kalamazoo. what? No who wrote that this is? why you should never let the interns do

00:12

anything around here. schmuck. not Kalamazoo space. space was the actual [businesswoman gives presenation]

00:18

answer we were looking for. home of eternal cold darkness and intelligent

00:23

beings with a penchant for giving out free probing colonoscopies. yeah aliens

00:29

might not have been impressed but we Earthlings had seriously come a long way

00:32

by the time the 1950s rolled around. in fact we'll just go ahead and shoot this

00:38

one right here transportation technology was spectacularly advanced. yeah - - no

00:44

we weren't beaming each other up Scotty not quite yet we still got a long way to

00:48

go on that one but we've come a long way from the hunter-gatherer days when our

00:52

main source of transportation was running or walking for those not in a [caveman walks]

00:58

rush but by the 1950s Jets could take us across the ocean in a few hours.

01:02

more and more Americans owned cars there was a massive national highway system

01:07

and heavy goods were shipped by trains and steam ships. with a little bit of

01:11

money humans could go anywhere on the planet in less than a day

01:14

so just because tootin it was so fun the first time we'll do it again.

01:19

transportation technology had come a long way, but humans had one giant leap

01:25

left. and it wasn't Kalamazoo. space final frontier. well we had to explore strange

01:30

new worlds seek out new life and civilizations and yes boldly go where no

01:35

man or woman has gone before. Shatner would be disappointed if we didn't.

01:40

in 1961 the first human was sent into space. by 1969 Neil Armstrong had played

01:46

golf on the moon. even though most people on the planet won't get within a hundred [man walks on the moon]

01:50

miles of a space shuttle the era of space travel had opened new doors for

01:55

Humanity as a whole. if we want to fly into space pointing our bowling airliner

01:59

up and pressing the gas pedal isn't quite gonna work. there's no air in space

02:04

and a puny jet engine isn't strong enough to overcome gravity. anyway what

02:08

we needed was a rocket. easy-peasy right? actually

02:12

at all opposite of that Hardy party. lots of different guys around the world

02:16

experimented with different fuels nozzles and materials to build rockets

02:21

that might be able to get a heavy hunk of metal into space. by 1926 Robert

02:26

Godard had managed to find the magic combination a certain kind of hourglass [rocket under construction pictured]

02:31

shaped nozzle and liquid fuel. over the next two decades. Rockets got bigger and

02:36

better and people started to think seriously about getting into space which

02:41

is impressive considering we have to think seriously about whether or not

02:44

we're motivated to move off the couch to use the bathroom. [child eyes the bathroom]

Full Transcript