SCIENCE 5 - G5 Enrichment Activities: Outer Space

Award-winning author Don Brown explores the history of rocket building in this installment of the Big Ideas That Changed the World series   "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong said those iconic words when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. But it wasn't just one man who got us to the moon--there was a whole team of people, plus centuries of discoveries and technologies that came before, that made it possible. From ancient Chinese rockets to the first steps on the moon, Rocket to the Moon! reveals which "bombs bursting in air" inspired the writer of "The Star-Spangled Banner," why the Russians wanted to launch a dog into Earth's atmosphere, and how exactly astronauts are able to go to the bathroom while in a rocket far off in space!   Big Ideas That Changed the World is a graphic novel series that celebrates the hard-won succession of ideas that ultimately changed the world. Humor, drama, and art unite to tell the story of events, discoveries, and ingenuity over time that led humans to come up with a big idea and then make it come true.  

In the graphic novelAstronauts: Women on the Final Frontier, Jim Ottaviani and illustrator Maris Wicks capture the great humor and incredible drive of Mary Cleave, Valentina Tereshkova, and the first women in space. The U.S. may have put the first man on the moon, but it was the Soviet space program that made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. It took years to catch up, but soon NASA's first female astronauts were racing past milestones of their own. The trail-blazing women of Group 9, NASA's first mixed gender class, had the challenging task of convincing the powers that be that a woman's place is in space, but they discovered that NASA had plenty to learn about how to make space travel possible foreveryone.