VOA慢速英语 太空竞赛的获胜者是俄罗斯人

　　VOICE TWO:

　　Congress approved the money. NASA organized the program. The McDonnell Company designed and built the spacecraft. The Army and Air Force built the Redstone, Jupiter and Atlas rockets. NASA announced the seven astronauts it had chosen on April ninth, nineteen fifty-nine. They immediately began training for space flight.

　　No time was wasted. The first test flights began later that year. Those test flights did not carry astronauts. Men would fly the Mercury spacecraft only after it was proved safe.

　　The final test flight was made at the end of January, nineteen sixty-one. A Mercury spacecraft carried a chimpanzee named Ham on a seven hundred kilometer flight over the Atlantic Ocean. There were some problems. But the animal survived the launch and the landing in the ocean.

　　VOICE ONE:

　　But before NASA could send an astronaut into space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union became the first person to travel in space. On April twelfth, nineteen-sixty one, he orbited the Earth one time in the Vostok One spacecraft. His space flight lasted one hour and forty-eight minutes.

[小精 灵 儿童 网站]