Encyclopedia
The
Space Race was an informal
competition between the
United States and the
Soviet Union that lasted roughly from 1957 to 1975. It involved the parallel efforts by each of those countries to explore
outer space with
artificial satellites, to send
humans into space, and to land people on the
Moon.
Though its roots lie in early
rocket technology and in the international tensions following
World War II, the Space Race effectively began after the Soviet launch of
Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957. The term originated as an analogy to the arms race. The Space Race became an important part of the cultural and technological rivalry between the USSR and the United States during the
Cold War. Space technology became a particularly important arena in this conflict, both because of its potential military applications and due to the morale-boosting psychological benefits.
Background
Early military influences
Rockets have interested scientists and amateurs for centuries. The
Chinese used them as weapons as early as the 11th century. Russian scientist
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky theorized in the 1880s on multi-stage, liquid fuel rockets which might reach space, but only in 1926 did the American Robert Goddard design a practical liquid fuel rocket.
Goddard performed his work on rocketry in obscurity, as the scientific community, the public, and even
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scoffed at him. It took war to catapult rocketry to notoriety. This proved a harbinger for the future, as any "space race" would become inextricably linked to
military ambitions of the nations involved, despite its mostly scientific character and peaceful rhetoric.
German contributions
In the mid-1920s,
German scientists began experimenting with rockets powered by liquid propellants that were capable of reaching relatively high altitudes and distances. In 1932, the Reichswehr, predecessor of the
Wehrmacht, took an interest in rocketry for long-range
artillery fire.
Wernher von Braun, an aspiring rocket scientist, joined the effort and developed such weapons for
Nazi Germany's use in
World War II. Von Braun borrowed heavily from Robert Goddard's original research, studying and improving on Goddard's rockets.
The German
A-4 Rocket, launched in 1942, became the first such projectile to reach space. In 1943, Germany began production of its successor, the
V-2 rocket, with a range of 300 km and carrying a 1000 kg
warhead. The Wehrmacht fired thousands of V-2s at Allied nations, causing massive damage and loss of life. However, more laborers were killed in the production of V2s than were killed by them in attacks.
As World War II drew to a close, Soviet, British, and American military and scientific crews raced to capture technology and trained personnel from the German rocket program installation at
Peenemünde. The USSR and Britain had some success, but the United States arguably benefited most, taking a large number of German rocket scientists – many of them members of the
Nazi Party, including von Braun – from Germany to the United States as part of
Operation Paperclip. American scientists adapted the German rockets – for use against hostile nations; and other uses. Post-war scientists, including von Braun, turned to rockets to study high-altitude conditions of temperature and pressure of the
atmosphere,
cosmic rays, and other topics.
Cold War roots
After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union became locked in a bitter
Cold War of espionage and
propaganda. Space exploration and
satellite technology could feed into the cold war on both fronts. Satellite-borne equipment could spy on other countries, while space-faring accomplishments could serve as propaganda to tout a country's scientific prowess and military potential. The same rockets that might send a human into orbit or hit a specific spot on the Moon could send an
atom bomb to a specific enemy city. Much of the technological development required for space travel applied equally well to wartime rockets such as
Intercontinental ballistic missiles . Along with other aspects of the arms race, progress in space appeared as an indicator of technological and economic prowess, demonstrating the superiority of the ideology of that country. Space research had a dual purpose: it could serve peaceful ends, but could also contribute to military goals.
The two
superpowers each worked to gain an edge in space research, neither knowing who might make a breakthrough first. They had each laid the groundwork for a race to space, and awaited only the starter's gun.
Artificial satellites
Sputnik
On 4 October 1957, the USSR successfully launched
Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to reach orbit, and the Space Race began. Because of its military and economic implications, Sputnik caused fear and stirred political debate in the United States. At the same time, the Sputnik launch was seen in the Soviet Union as an important sign of scientific and engineering capabilities of the nation.
In the Soviet Union the launch of Sputnik and the following program of space exploration was met with great interest from the public. For the country recently recovered from devastating war it was important and encouraging to see the proof of technical prowess in the new era.
Before Sputnik, the average American assumed that the U.S. had superiority in all fields of technology.
Von Braun's counterpart in the Soviet Union,
Sergei Korolev, the chief engineer who designed the
R-7 rocket which sent Sputnik into orbit, would later engineer the
N-1, designed to launch
cosmonauts to the Moon. In response to Sputnik, the U.S. would launch a huge effort to regain technological supremacy, including revamping the school curricula in the hope of producing more von Brauns and Korolevs. This reaction is nowadays known as the
Sputnik crisis.
Lyndon B. Johnson,
Vice President to President
John F. Kennedy, expressed the motivation for these American efforts as follows:
- In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything.
The American public, initially discouraged and frightened by Sputnik, became captivated by the American projects which followed. Schoolchildren followed the succession of launches, and building
replicas of rockets became a popular hobby. President Kennedy gave speeches encouraging people to support the
space program and trying to overcome the skepticism of many who felt the millions of dollars might better go on building stocks of proven, existing armaments, or on fighting
poverty.
Nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, the U.S. launched its first satellite,
Explorer I. In the meantime, a number of embarrassing launch failures had occurred at
Cape Canaveral.
The very first satellites were already used for scientific purposes. Both
Sputnik and
Explorer I were launched as part of each country's participation in the International Geophysical Year. Sputnik helped to determine the density of the upper atmosphere and
Explorer I flight data led to the discovery by
James Van Allen of the
Van Allen radiation belt.
Satellite communications
The first American
communications satellite, Project SCORE, launched on December 18 1958, relayed a Christmas message from
President Eisenhower to the world. Other notable examples of satellite communication during the Space Race include:
- 1962: Telstar: the first "active" communications satellite
- 1972: Anik 1: first domestic communications satellite
- 1974: WESTAR: first U.S. domestic communications satellite
- 1976: MARISAT: first mobile communications satellite
Other noteworthy satellites
The U.S. launched the first geosynchronous satellite,
Syncom-2, on July 26 1963. The success of this class of satellite meant that a simple satellite dish no longer needed to track the orbit of the satellite, as that orbit remained geostationary. Henceforth ordinary citizens could use satellite-mediated communications transmissions for television broadcasts, after a one-time setup.
Living creatures in space
Animals in space
Fruit flies launched by the U.S. on captured German
V-2 rockets in 1946 became the first
animals sent into space for scientific study. The first living creature sent into orbit, the dog
Laika, traveled in the USSR's
Sputnik 2 in 1957. While in any event the technology did not exist at the time to recover Laika after her flight, she died of stress and overheating soon after reaching space. In 1960 Russian space dogs
Belka and Strelka orbited the earth and successfully returned. The American space program imported
chimpanzees from Africa, and sent
at least two into space before launching their first human orbiter. In June 1997 the Air Force announced it would be giving away the last of its chimps through a public divestiture authorized by Congress. Two months after their transfer to the Coulston Foundation, a New Mexico research laboratory, the Save the Chimps Foundation filed suit to remove them. This action eventually allowed their "release" to semi-wild conditions in 1999 in a South Florida sanctuary. Soviet-launched
turtles in 1968 on Zond 5 became the first animals to fly around the Moon.
Humans in space
Yuri Gagarin became the first successful
cosmonaut when he entered
orbit in Russia's
Vostok 1 on April 12 1961, a day now celebrated as a holiday in Russia and in many other countries. 23 days later, on mission
Freedom 7,
Alan Shepard first entered space for the U.S.
John Glenn, in
Friendship 7, became the first American to successfully orbit Earth, completing three orbits on February 20 1962.
The first dual-manned flight also originated in the USSR, August 11 - 15, 1962. Soviet
Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on June 16 1963 in Vostok 6. Korolev had initially scheduled further Vostok missions of longer duration, but following the announcement of the Apollo Program,
Premier Khrushchev demanded more firsts. The first flight with more than one crew member, the USSR's
Voskhod 1, a modified version of the Vostok craft, took off on October 12 1964 carrying Komarov, Feoktistov and Yegorov onboard. This flight also marked the first occasion on which a crew did not wear
spacesuits.
Aleksei Leonov, from
Voskhod 2, launched by the USSR on March 18 1965, carried out the first
spacewalk. This mission nearly ended in disaster; Leonov almost failed to return to the capsule and, due to a poor retrorocket fire, the ship landed 1000 miles off target. By this time Khrushchev had left office and the new Soviet leadership would not commit to an all-out effort.
Lunar missions
Though the achievements made by the US and the USSR brought great pride to their respective nations, the ideological climate ensured that the Space Race would continue at least until the first human walked on the Moon. Before this achievement, unmanned spacecraft had to first explore the Moon by photography and demonstrate their ability to land safely on it.
Unmanned probes
Following the Soviet success in placing the first satellite into orbit, the Americans focused their efforts on sending a probe to the Moon. They called the first attempt to do this the
Pioneer program. The Soviet Luna program became operational with the launch of
Luna 1 on January 4 1959, and
Luna 1 became the first probe to reach the Moon. In addition to the Pioneer program, there were three specific American programs: the
Ranger program, the
Lunar Orbiter program, and the
robotic
Surveyor program, with the goal of locating potential Apollo landing sites on the Moon.
Lunar landing
While the Soviets beat the Americans to most of the Space Race's initial firsts, they failed to beat the U.S.
Apollo program to land a man on the Moon. After the early Soviet successes, especially Gagarin's flight, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson looked for an American project that would capture the public’s imagination. The Apollo Program met many of their objectives and promised to defeat arguments from politicians both on the left and the right . Apollo’s advantages included:
- economic benefits to several key states in the next election;
- closing the “missile gap” claimed by Kennedy during the 1960 election through dual-use technology;
- technical and scientific spin-off benefits
In conversation with NASA’s director,
James E. Webb, Kennedy said:
- Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the Moon ahead of the Russians... otherwise we shouldn't be spending that kind of money, because I'm not interested in space... The only justification is because we hope to beat the USSR to demonstrate that instead of being behind by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.
Kennedy and Johnson managed to swing public opinion: by 1965, 58% of Americans favored Apollo, up from 33% in 1963. After Johnson became President in 1963, his continuing support allowed the program to succeed.
The USSR showed a greater ambivalence about human visits to the Moon. Soviet leader Khrushchev wanted neither "defeat" by another power, nor the expense of such a project. In October 1963 he characterized the USSR as "not at present planning flight by cosmonauts to the Moon", while adding that they had not dropped out of the race. A year passed before the USSR committed itself to a Moon-landing attempt.
Kennedy proposed joint programs, such as a Moon landing by Soviet and American astronauts and improved weather-monitoring satellites. Khrushchev, sensing an attempt to steal superior Russian space technology, rejected these ideas. Korolev, the
Soviet Space Agency's chief designer, had started promoting his Soyuz craft and the
N1 launcher rocket that had the capacity for a manned Moon landing. Khrushchev directed Korolev's design bureau to arrange further space firsts by modifying the existing Vostok technology, while a second team started building a completely new launcher and craft, the Proton booster and the Zond, for a manned cislunar flight in 1966. In 1964 the new Soviet leadership gave Korolev the backing for a Moon landing effort and brought all manned projects under his direction. With Korolev's death and the failure of the first Soyuz flight in 1967, the co-ordination of the Soviet Moon landing program quickly unraveled. The Soviets built a landing craft and selected cosmonauts for the mission that would have placed
Aleksei Leonov on the Moon's surface, but with the successive launch failures of the N1 booster in 1969, plans for a manned landing suffered first delay and then cancellation.
While unmanned Soviet probes had reached the Moon before any U.S. craft, American
Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface on 21 July 1969, after landing the previous day. Commander of the
Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong received backup from command-module pilot Michael Collins and lunar-module pilot
Buzz Aldrin in an event watched by over 500 million people around the world. Social commentators widely recognize the lunar landing as one of the defining moments of the 20th century, and Armstrong's words on his first touching the Moon's surface became similarly memorable:
Unlike other international rivalries, the Space Race was not motivated by the desire for territorial expansion. After its successful landings on the Moon, the U.S. explicitly disclaimed the right to ownership of any part of the Moon.
Other successes
Missions to other planets
The Soviet Union first sent planetary probes to both
Venus and
Mars in 1960. The first spacecraft to successfully fly by
Venus, the U.S.'s
Mariner 2, did so on December 14 1962. It sent back surprising data on the high surface temperature and air density of Venus. Since it carried no cameras, its findings did not capture public attention as did images from space probes, which far exceeded the capacity of astronomers' Earth-based telescopes.
The USSR's
Venera 7, launched in 1971, became the first craft to land on Venus.
Venera 9 then transmitted the first pictures from the surface of another planet. These represent only two in the long
Venera series; several other previous Venera spacecraft performed flyby operations and attempted landing missions. Seven other Venera landers followed.
The US launched
Mariner 10, which flew by Venus on its way to Mercury, in 1974. It became the first, and so far the only, spacecraft to fly by Mercury.
Mariner 4, launched in 1965 by the U.S., became the first probe to fly by
Mars; it transmitted completely unexpected images. The first spacecraft on Mars,
Mars 3, launched in 1971 by the USSR, did not return pictures. The US
Viking landers of 1976 transmitted the first such pictures.
The U.S also sent
Pioneer 10 on a successful flyby of
Jupiter in 1973. This foreshadowed the first flyby of
Saturn in 1979 with
Pioneer 11, and the first and only flybys of
Uranus and
Neptune with
Voyager 2.
Launches and docking
The first space rendezvous took place between
Gemini 6 and
Gemini 7, both U.S. craft, on December 15 1965. Their successor,
Gemini 8, performed the first space docking on March 16 1966. The first automatic space docking linked the USSR's Cosmos-186 and Cosmos-188 on October 30 1967.
The first launch from the sea took place with the U.S.'s Scout B, on April 26 1967. The first
space station, the USSR's
Salyut 1, commenced operations on June 7 1971.
Military competition
Out of view, but no less real a competition, the drive to develop space for military uses paralleled scientific efforts. Well before the launch of Sputnik 1, both the US and the USSR started developing plans for
reconnaissance satellites. The Soviet Zenit spacecraft, which by the dual-use designed in by
Korolev eventually became
Vostok, began as a photoimaging satellite. It competed with the US Air Force's Discoverer series. Discoverer XIII provided the first payload recovered from space in August 1960 -
one day ahead of the first Soviet recovered payload.
Both the US and USSR developed major military space programs, often following a pattern whereby the US only completed a mockup before its program ended, while the USSR built, or even orbited, theirs:
- Supersonic Intercontinental Cruise Missile: Navaho vs. Buran cruise missile
- Small Winged Spacecraft: X-20 Dyna-Soar vs. MiG-105
- Satellite Inspection Capsule: Blue Gemini vs. Soyuz interceptor
- Military Space Station: MOL vs. Almaz
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- Military Capsule with hatch in heat shield: Gemini B vs. VA TKS, also known as Merkur space capsule
- Ferry to Military Space Station: Gemini Ferry vs. TKS
The "end" of the Space Race
While the
Sputnik 1 launch can clearly be called the start of the Space Race, its end is more debatable. Most hotly contested during the 1960s, the Space Race continued apace through the
Apollo moon landing of 1969. Although they followed
Apollo 11 with five more manned lunar landings, American space scientists turned to new arenas.
Skylab would gather data, and the
Space Shuttle would work on returning spaceships intact from space journeys. Americans would claim that by first landing a man on the moon they had won this unofficial "race". Soviet scientists meanwhile pushed ahead with their own projects, and would likely not have conceded anything like defeat. In any event, as the
Cold War cooled, and as other nations began to develop their own space programs, the notion of a continuing "race" between the two superpowers became less real.
Both nations had developed manned military space programs. The USAF had proposed using its Titan missile to launch the
Dyna-Soar hypersonic glider to use in intercepting enemy satellites. The plan for the
Manned Orbiting Laboratory superseded Dyna-Soar, but this also suffered cancellation. The USSR commissioned the
Almaz program for a similar manned military space station, which merged with the Salyut program.
The Space Race slowed after the Apollo landing, which many observers describe as its apex or even as its end. Others, including space historian Carole Scott and Romanian Dr. Florin Pop's
Cold War Project, feel its end came most clearly with the joint
Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975. The Soviet craft
Soyuz 19 met and docked in space with America's
Apollo, allowing astronauts from the "rival" nations to pass into each other's ships and participate in combined experimentation. Although each country's endeavors in space persisted, they went largely in different "directions", and the notion of a continuing two-nation "race" became outdated after
Apollo-Soyuz.
Even at this point of cooperation the Soviet leadership was alarmed at the prospect of
USAF involvement with the
Space Shuttle program and began the competing
Buran and
Energia projects. In the early 1980s the commencement of the US
Strategic Defense Initiative further escalated competition that only resolved with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
Organization, funding, and economic impact
The huge expenditures and bureaucracy needed to organize successful
space exploration led to the creation of national space agencies. The United States and the Soviet Union developed programs focused solely on the scientific and industrial requirements for these efforts.
On July 29 1958, President Eisenhower signed the
National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . When it began operations on October 1 1958, NASA consisted mainly of the four laboratories and some 8,000 employees of the government's 46-year-old research agency for aeronautics, the
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics . While its predecessor, NACA, operated on a
$5 million budget, NASA funding rapidly accelerated to $5 billion per year, including huge sums for subcontractors from the private sector. The
Apollo 11 Moon landing, the high point of NASA's success, cost an estimated
$US 20 to 25 billion.
Lack of reliable statistics makes it difficult to compare U.S. and Soviet space spending, especially during the Khrushchev years. However in 1989, the then-Chief of Staff of the Soviet Armed Services, General M. Moiseyev, reported that the Soviet Union had allocated 6.9 billion
rubles to its space program that year. Other Soviet officials estimated that their total manned space expenses totalled about that amount over the entire duration of the programs, with some lower unofficial estimates of about four and half billion rubles. In addition to the murkiness of the figures, such comparisons must also take into account the likely effect of Soviet propaganda, which pursued the goal of making the Soviet Union look strong and of confusing the Western analysis.
Organizational issues, particularly internal rivalries, also plagued the Soviet effort. The USSR had nothing like NASA . Too many political issues in science and too many personal views handicapped Soviet progress. Every Soviet chief designer had to stand for his own ideas, looking for the patronage of a communist official. In 1964, between the various chief designers, the USSR was developing 30 different programs of launcher and spacecraft design. Following the death of Korolev the Soviet space program became reactive, attempting to maintain parity with the US. In 1974 the USSR reorganized their space program, creating the
Energia project to duplicate the US
Space Shuttle with
Buran.
The Soviets also operated in the face of an economic disadvantage. Although the Soviet economy was the second largest in the world, the US economy was the largest. Eventually the Soviets' inefficient organization and lack of funds led them to lose their early advantage. Some observers have argued that the high economic cost of the space race, along with the extremely expensive arms race, eventually deepened the economic crisis of the Soviet system during the late 1970's and 80's and was one of the factors that led to the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
Legacy
Deaths
When America's Apollo 15 left the moon, the astronauts left behind a memorial to astronauts from both nations who had perished during the efforts to reach the Moon. In the United States, the first astronauts to die during direct participation in space travel or preparation served in
Apollo 1: Command Pilot
Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot
Edward White, and Pilot
Roger Chaffee. These three died in a fire during a ground test on January 27, 1967.
Flights of the Soviet Union's Soyuz 1 and
Soyuz 11 also resulted in cosmonaut deaths. Soyuz 1, launched into orbit on April 23 1967, carried a single cosmonaut, Colonel
Vladimir Mikhailovich Komarov, who died when the spacecraft crashed after return to Earth. In 1971, Soyuz 11's cosmonauts
Georgi Dobrovolski,
Viktor Patsayev, and
Vladislav Volkov asphyxiated during reentry.
Other astronauts died in related missions, including four Americans who died in crashes of
T-38 aircraft. Russian Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, met a similar death when he crashed in a
MiG-15 fighter in 1968.
Advances in technology and education
Technology, especially in aerospace engineering and
electronic communication, advanced greatly during this period. The effects of the Space Race however went far beyond rocketry, physics, and astronomy. "Space age technology" extended to fields as diverse as home economics and forest defoliation studies, and the push to win the race changed the very ways in which students learned science.
American concerns that they had fallen so quickly behind the Soviets in the race to space led quickly to a push by legislators and educators for greater emphasis on mathematics and on the physical sciences in U.S. schools. America's National Defense Education Act of 1958 increased funding for these goals from childhood education through the post-graduate level. To this day over 1,200 U.S. High Schools retain their own planetarium installations, a situation unparalled in any other country worldwide and a direct consequence of the Space Race.
The scientists fostered by these efforts helped develop for space exploration technologies which have seen adapted uses ranging from the kitchen to athletic fields. Dried watermelon and ready-to-eat foods, stay-dry clothing, and even no-fog ski goggles have their roots in space science.
Today over a thousand artificial satellites orbit earth, relaying communications data around the planet and facilitating
remote sensing of data on weather, vegetation, and human movements to nations who employ them. In addition, much of the micro-technology which fuels everyday activities from time-keeping to enjoying music derives from research initially driven by the Space Race.
The USSR remained the undisputed leader in rocketry, even up to the end of the Cold War. The U.S. became superior in electronics, remote sensing, vehicle guidance, and
robotic control.
Recent events
Although its pace has slowed,
space exploration continues to advance long after the demise of the Space Race. The USA launched the first reusable spacecraft on the 20th anniversary of Gagarin's flight, April 12 1981. On November 15 1988, the USSR launched
Buran, their first and only automatic reusable spacecraft. These and other nations continue to launch probes, satellites of many types, and huge space telescopes.
The possibility of a second international space race appeared at the end of the 20th century, with the
European Space Agency 
