When We Left Earth

Yesterday, we watched a cool video on the original astronauts from the Mercury Project. It is considered one of the crowning achievements in the history of mankind, and rightly so. The United States sent a man to outer space on the top of a jet missile, and then got him back to Earth.

1. What would it have been like to be one of the first astronauts? Describe the positives and negatives to being one of the first people in space. Would you have wanted to be in Alan Shephard's space shoes?


2. Would you have been nervous/scared/excited/etc.? Explain. Do you have any life experiences where you have felt the kind of emotions that astronauts felt before launching?


3. Could just anyone become an astronaut? What are some of the challenges to becoming one? Which qualities are the most important?


4. Why was it so important to send a human to outer space?

When I Grow Up..

.......I want to be an astronaut. In the last several decades, many boys and girls in this country have said those words. Would you really like to be an astronaut?
I'd like to revisit some questions that we thought, wrote, and talked about yesterday. Imagine that you're an astronaut in the 1960s, like John Glenn in the video clip below. What kind of emotions would you feel as you put on the spacesuit? How about as you board a tiny capsule that happens to be sitting on a 6.5 million pound, longer-than-a-football-field rocket? How about when you break free of Earth's gravity and view the Earth from above?

• What would it be like to be an astronaut during those tense (yet thrilling) moments?
• In your experiences, is there anything that you might be able to compare it to?
• Why would the title of the When We Left Earth episode (from which this video clip came from) be "Ordinary Supermen"?