PDF VERSION: 1970s pants reserach paper

Katrina Simon

April 1, 2016

1970’s Space Research Paper – Pants Project

My group had the 1970’s and I chose to research Space in 1970’s – specifically what NASA was doing during the time and how American’s felt about space then. First, I researched specific launches that NASA did, like the Pioneer 10 and 11 launch, and Apollo 13. Apollo 13 on April 4^th 1970 had an explosion in the fuel cells causing the main power supply to cut off and let oxygen and water very low. It was a dangerous journey back to earth from this but Apollo 13 successful returned on April 17^th. This was a very scary time for Americans because this was the first time that a NASA mission had gone so wrong and there was a large chance that the astronauts on board could not make it back. Because this happened in 1970, it really shaped how Americans felt about space- they were scared of it and there was less excitement about going up into space and less interest in NASA. Reading this and understanding how people felt during this time, I started to feel how scared Americans might have felt.

I interviewed my dad – he’s a big science buff, knows a lot about NASA and is into space, and was alive during this time which is important since I was not. He had a lot of insight about what I was researching and told me about how there was a huge interest in trying to contact people, or “ETs”, in space and on other planets. I became fascinated with this idea, reminding me of movies like Starwars, which was released in 1977, Alien (1979) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), all of which are about the idea that extraterrestrials exist.

I researched more and learned about SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. I discovered that SETI on August 15, 1977 heard what has been thought of as 72 seconds of radio signal from space. The signal was very unusual and caused a lot of excitement but a similar transmission has not been seen since. To “see” the radio signal, there was a graph that was charting all the sounds. Learning about all this I began to feel the same excitement that the people and scientists during this time would have felt. I even felt a little bit scared about it- really do “aliens” exist?!? The sound wave graph, which got the name “wow” signal, got me excited because of the one large peak it had where there was a significant sound from space. It creates a beautiful shape and empty space. Even the y and x axis lines in the graph create a kind of pattern that when staring at it, certain parts start to fad and some parts jump out at me, and there’s even some type of movement and excitement in what looks like at first glance to be very solitary lines. The graph lines and the peaks of the graph got me very interested in the topic, gave me the same sense of excitement as people would have felt during the 1970’s when they first heard and saw this graph. From feeling this way and understanding the time, I wanted to create my pants so they would have that same excitement level.

Sources:

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/883207-strange-radio-signal-from-space-still-a-mystery-40-years-later-alien-communication/

http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/hist_1970.html

http://www.virginmedia.com/digital/science/space/1970s.php