NASA: I don’t even know what it stands for. I do know it was created by Dwight Eisenhower at the start of the Space Race and was used to learn about the great unknown and establish America as a leader in space exploration. I know that NASA put the first man on the moon in ‘69. Since then, NASA has been exploring outer space, developing advanced technology, and answering some of the world’s most interesting and hardest to solve questions.

When I was younger, I received a telescope for Christmas. It was one of the cool kinds; it knew its location and the date and, based off of those, could locate any planet or star in the sky. Unfortunately, after spending about a week looking at Saturn’s rings and the Moon’s craters, the telescope broke, but my fascination with outer space never died. In elementary school, I aspired to be an astronaut. My sister and I would build rocketships out of refrigerator boxes and pretend we landed on the moon. When my family went to bookstores, I would pick out books about astronauts Sally Ride and pilot Amelia Earhart. Around the same time, my parents introduced me to the movie Apollo 13. The movie was about a space mission that went wrong but was saved in the end. It quickly became my favorite movie, and whenever I was given the opportunity to pick my family’s nightly entertainment, I’d choose Apollo 13.

Learning about Sally ride, the first American woman to go into space, I became even more interested in becoming an astronaut. I remember laying in my parents’ bed, researching what it took to become an astronaut. My dad would email me articles about NASA recruiting people to go into space and information about paying to be a passenger on a commercial space shuttle. It was always overwhelmingly expensive, but super fun to look into with my dad. Since then, I’ve redirected most of my exploration interests to the ocean and the Human brain, but outer space is still extremely interesting to me.

I used my time in middle school and some of high school to learn about the historical side of going into space. Through history projects, I learned about the Space Race and its importance as a sub-section of the Cold War became fascinated with nuclear bombs and their history. While studying the Cold War and nuclear warfare, I learned that the Soviet Union launched Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik. Not only did Sputnik start the Space Race, but it showed the world that the Soviet Union had the resources and means to launch a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world. Learning just the brief history of why America found it important to create the technology to go into space made me even more fascinated with NASA.

Because of my interest in space and history, I want to learn more about NASA. By researching NASA, its landmark events, and its contributions to modern science, I will create a project that shows how important NASA has been in the historical context and how it has influenced society and science today. What role did women play in NASA? What rights did Soviet women have that American women didn’t that allowed Soviet women to travel to space first? Along with answering these questions, I look forward to learning what preceded NASA and how those might have contributed to Eisenhower’s creation of NASA. This project will give me an opportunity to further explore a topic that has captured my interest since I was a little kid.