10. Read the text, fill in the gaps and answer the questions. but also possible taken why wait achievement Humans have always looked at the heavens and wondered about the nature of the objects seen in the night sky. With the development of rockets and the advances in electronics and other technologies in the 20th century, it became (1) to send machines and animals and then people above Earth’s atmosphere into outer space. Well before technology made these (2) possible, however, space exploration had already captured the minds of many people, not only aircraft pilots and scientists (3) writers and artists. The strong hold that space travel has always had on the imagination may well explain (4) professional astronauts and laypeople alike consent at their great peril, in the words of Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff (1979), to sit “on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and (5) someone to light the fuse.” It perhaps also explains why space exploration has been a common and enduring theme in literature and art. As cen- turies of speculative fiction in books and more recently in films make clear, “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” was (6) by the human spirit many times and in many ways before Neil Armstrong stamped hu-mankind’s first footprint on the Moon.