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Space Race
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The 'Space Race' was a competition of space exploration between the Soviet Union and the United States, which lasted roughly from 1957 to 1975. It involved the efforts to explore outer space with artificial satellites, to send humans into space, and to land people on the Moon.
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, technological, and ideological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Space technology became a particularly important arena in this conflict, because of both its potential military applications and the morale-boosting social benefits.
Artificial satellitesSputnik
On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, thus beginning the Space Race.
Because of its military and economic implications, Sputnik caused fear and stirred political debate in the United States, spurring the Eisenhower administration to enact several initiatives, including the formation of NASA.
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Encyclopedia
The 'Space Race' was a competition of space exploration between the Soviet Union and the United States, which lasted roughly from 1957 to 1975. It involved the efforts to explore outer space with artificial satellites, to send humans into space, and to land people on the Moon.
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, technological, and ideological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Space technology became a particularly important arena in this conflict, because of both its potential military applications and the morale-boosting social benefits.
Artificial satellitesSputnik
On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, thus beginning the Space Race.
Because of its military and economic implications, Sputnik caused fear and stirred political debate in the United States, spurring the Eisenhower administration to enact several initiatives, including the formation of NASA. 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, a country recovering from a devastating war, the launch of Sputnik and the following program of space exploration were met with great interest from the public.It was also important and encouraging for Soviet citizens to see the proof of technical prowess in the new era.
Before Sputnik, the average American assumed that the United States had superiority in all fields of technology. In response to Sputnik, the United States launched a huge effort to regain technological supremacy, including revamping the school curriculum. Within less than a year, the United States Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, the most far-reaching federally-sponsored education initiative in the nation's history. The bill authorized expenditures of more than $1 billion for a wide range of reforms including new school construction, fellowships and loans to encourage promising students to seek higher education, new efforts in vocational education to meet critical manpower shortages in the defense industry, and a host of other programs. This reaction is now known as the Sputnik crisis.
As with the Soviet public, the American public followed the succession of launches, and building replicas of rockets became a popular hobby.
Nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, the United States launched its first satellite, Explorer 1. In the meantime, several embarrassing launch failures had occurred at Cape Canaveral.
The first satellites were already used for scientific purposes. Sputnik helped to determine the density of the upper atmosphere, and Explorer 1 flight data led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belt by James Van Allen.
Satellite communicationsThe first American communications satellite, Project SCORE, launched on 18 December 1958, relayed a Christmas message from President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the world. Other notable examples of satellite communication during (or spawned by) the Space Race include:
- 1962: Telstar: the first "active" communications satellite (experimental transoceanic)
- 1972: Anik 1: first domestic communications satellite
- 1974: Westar: first U.S. domestic communications satellite
- 1976: Marisat: first mobile communications satellite
The United States launched the first geosynchronous satellite, Syncom-2, on 26 July 1963. The success of this class of satellite meant that a simple satellite dish no longer needed to track the orbit of the satellite because that orbit remained geostationary. Henceforth ordinary citizens could use satellite-mediated communications transmissions for television broadcasts, after a one-time setup.
Living creatures in spaceAnimals in spaceFruit flies launched by the United States on captured German V-2 rockets in 1946 became the first reported animals sent into space for scientific study.
The first animal sent into orbit, the dog Laika (in English, "Barker"), traveled in the Soviet Union's Sputnik 2 in 1957. The dog was never meant to be returned back to Earth, and died five to seven hours after launch from overheating and stress. In 1960 Soviet 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. The Soviet Union launched turtles in 1968 on Zond 5, which became the first animals to fly around the Moon.
Humans in spaceThe Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space when he entered orbit in the Soviet Union's Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, a day now celebrated as a holiday in Russia and in many other countries. He orbited the Earth for 108 minutes. The lead architects behind the Vostok 1 mission were the Soviet rocket scientists Sergey Korolyov and Kerim Kerimov.
Twenty-three days later, on sub-orbital mission Freedom 7, Alan Shepard entered space for the United States, and John Glenn, in Friendship 7, became the first American to successfully orbit Earth, completing three orbits on 20 February 1962.
The first dual-manned flights also originated in the Soviet Union, on 11 August - 15 August 1962. Soviet Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space on 16 June 1963 in Vostok 6. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet Space Agency's chief designer, 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 two crew members was the Soviet Union's Voskhod 1, a modified version of the Vostok craft, took off on 12 October 1964 carrying Komarov, Feoktistov, and Yegorov. This flight also marked the first occasion on which a crew did not wear spacesuits.
Alexey Leonov, from Voskhod 2, launched by the Soviet Union on 18 March 1965, carried out the first spacewalk. This mission nearly ended in disaster; Leonov almost failed to return to the capsule and, because of a poor retrorocket fire, the ship landed 1,600 kilometers (1,000 mi) off target. By this time Khrushchev had left office, and the new Soviet leadership would not commit to an all-out lunar landing effort.
Lunar missionsThough the achievements made by the United States and the Soviet Union 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 probesFollowing the Soviet success in placing the first satellite into orbit, the Americans focused their efforts on sending a probe to the Moon. They called this first attempt the Pioneer program. The Soviet Lunar program became operational with the launch of Luna 1 on 4 January 1959, and Luna 1 became the first probe to reach the vicinity of the Moon. The first craft to reach the surface of the Moon was Luna 2, launched on 12 September 1959. 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 landingAfter the Soviet successes, especially Gagarin's flight, United States President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. 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 (who favored social programs) and the right (who favored a more military project).
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 (for the cost) is because we hope to beat the Soviet Union to demonstrate that instead of being behind by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.
Kennedy was reminding Webb of the national security justification for the Space Race as a vital front in the Cold War. Kennedy was more explicit in his famous 1962 speech at Rice Stadium when he stated:
"The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the 40-yard lines. ... For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war."
Kennedy and Johnson managed to swing public opinion: by 1965, 58 percent of Americans favored Apollo, up from 33 percent in 1963. After Johnson became President in 1963, his continuing support allowed the program to succeed.
The Soviet Union showed a greater ambivalence about human visits to the Moon. Khrushchev wanted neither "defeat" by another power, nor the expense of such a project. In October 1963 he characterized the Soviet Union 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 Soviet Union committed itself to a Moon-landing attempt.
In December 1968, the United States became the front runner in the Space Race when James Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders orbited the moon. In doing so, they also became the first humans to celebrate Christmas in space and a few days later they safely splashed down.
Kennedy proposed joint programs, such as a Moon landing by American and Soviet astronauts and improved weather-monitoring satellites. Khrushchev, sensing an attempt to steal superior Russian space technology, rejected these ideas. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet Space Agency's chief designer who designed the R-7 rocket which sent Sputnik into orbit, 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 coordination of the Soviet Moon landing program quickly unraveled. Korolev's first choice for a lunar landing was Vladimir Komarov, but with Komarov's death on the Soyuz 1 in 1967, Yuri Gagarin and Aleksei Leonov became the most likely candidates. However, with Gagarin's death and the successive launch failures of the N1 booster in 1969, plans for a manned landing suffered first delay and then cancellation. In the end, the Soviet space program never got a man out of low Earth orbit.
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 United States explicitly disclaimed the right to ownership of any part of the Moon.
Other successesMissions to other planetsThe Soviet Union first sent planetary probes to both Venus and Mars in 1960. The first spacecraft to successfully fly by Venus, the United States' Mariner 2, did so on 14 December 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 Soviet Union'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 United States launched Mariner 10, which flew by Venus on its way to Mercury, in 1974. It became the first and only spacecraft to fly by Mercury for the next 34 years.
Mariner 4, launched in 1965 by the United States, became the first probe to fly by Mars; it transmitted completely unexpected images. The first spacecraft to land on Mars, Mars 3, launched in 1971 by the USSR, did not return pictures. The U.S. Viking landers of 1976 transmitted the first such pictures.
Launches and dockingThe American Gemini 7 and Gemini 6 spaceflights completed the world's first space rendezvous mission between two manned spacecraft on 15 December 1965. The spacecrafts came within a meter and kept station with each other for several orbits.
The U.S. craft Gemini 8, performed the first orbital space docking on 16 March 1966. The first automatic space docking linked the Soviet Union's Cosmos 186 and Cosmos 188 (two unmanned Soyuz spacecraft) on 30 October 1967. The first launch from the sea took place with the United States' Scout B, on 26 April 1967.
The first space station, the Soviet Union's Salyut 1, commenced operations on 7 June 1971. The lead architect behind the Salyut 1 was the Soviet rocket scientist Kerim Kerimov.
Military competitionOut 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 United States and the Soviet Union 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 United States 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 United States and the Soviet Union developed major military space programs, often following a pattern whereby the United States only completed a mockup before its program ended, while the Soviet Union built, or even orbited, theirs:
- Supersonic Intercontinental Cruise Missile: Navaho (test program stopped) vs. Buran cruise missile (plan)
- Small Winged Spacecraft: X-20 Dyna-Soar (mockup) vs. MiG-105 (flight-tested)
- Satellite Inspection Capsule: Blue Gemini (mockup) vs. Soyuz interceptor (plan)
- Military Space Station: MOL (plan) vs. Almaz (flown somewhat modified as Salyut 2, 3, and 5)
- Military Capsule with hatch in heat shield: Gemini B (tested crewless in space) vs. VA TKS, also known as Merkur space capsule (flown crewless as part of TKS)
- Ferry to Military Space Station: Gemini Ferry (plan) vs. TKS (flown crewless in space, and docked with a Salyut)
"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 was to gather data, and the Space Shuttle was intended to return spaceships intact from space journeys. Russians claimed that by first sending a man into space they had won this unofficial "race," however Americans claimed that by first landing a man on the moon they had won. In any event, as the Cold War subsided, 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 United States Air Force 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 (using hardware based on the Gemini program to carry out surveillance missions) superseded Dyna-Soar, but this also suffered cancellation. The Soviet Union 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.
However, the Soviet leadership was alarmed at the prospect of U.S. Air Force involvement with the Space Shuttle program and began the competing Buran and Energia projects. In the early 1980s the commencement of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative further escalated competition that only resolved with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989.
Timeline (1957-1975)| Date | Significance | Country-Agency | Mission Name |
|---|
>August 21, 1957
| First intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)
| USSR
| R-7 Semyorka/SS-6 Sapwood | October 4, 1957
| First artificial satellite
First signals from space | USSR | Sputnik 1 | >November 3, 1957
| First animal in orbit, the dog Laika
| USSR
| Sputnik 2 | >January 31, 1958
| First detection of Van Allen belts
| USA-ABMA
| Explorer 1 | >March 17, 1958
| First solar powered satellite
| USA-NRL
| Vanguard 1 | >December 18, 1958
| First communications satellite
| USA-ABMA
| Project SCORE | January 2, 1959
| First firing of a rocket in Earth orbit
First reaching Earth escape velocity
First detection of solar wind | USSR | Luna 1 | >January 4, 1959
| First man-made object in heliocentric orbit
| USSR
| Luna 1 | >February 17, 1959
| First weather satellite
| USA-NASA1
| Vanguard 2 | >February 28, 1959
| First satellite in a Polar orbit
| USA-DARPA
| Discoverer 1 | >August 7, 1959
| First photograph of Earth from orbit
| USA-NASA
| Explorer 6 | >September 13, 1959
| First impact into another world (the Moon)
| USSR
| Luna 2 | >October 4, 1959
| First photos of far side of the Moon
| USSR
| Luna 3 | >April 1, 1960
| First Imaging weather satellite
| USA-NASA
| TIROS-1 | >July 5, 1960
| First reconnaissance satellite
| USA-NRL
| GRAB-1 | >August 11, 1960
| First satellite payload recovered intact from orbit
| USA-Air Force
| Discoverer 13 | >August 12, 1960
| First passive communications satellite
| USA-NASA
| Echo 1A | >August 18, 1960
| First photo reconnaissance satellite
| USA-Air Force
| KH-1 9009 | 1961
| First launch from orbit
First mid-course corrections
First spin-stabilisation | USSR | Venera 1 | April 12, 1961
| First manned spaceflight
First manned orbital flight | USSR | Vostok 1 | >March 7, 1962
| First orbital solar observatory
| USA-NASA
| OSO-1 | >December 14, 1962
| Venus]] closest approach 34,773 kilometers)
| USA-NASA
| Mariner 2 | >June 16, 1963
| First woman in space
| USSR
| Vostok 6 | >July 19, 1963
| First reusable manned spacecraft (suborbital)
| USA-NASA
| X-15 Flight 90 | >July 26, 1963
| First geosynchronous satellite
| USA-NASA
| Syncom 2 | >December 5, 1963
| First satellite navigation system
| US Navy
| NAVSAT | >August 19, 1964
| First geostationary satellite
| USA-NASA
| Syncom 3 | >October 12, 1964
| First multi-man crew (3 members)
| USSR
| Voskhod 1 | >March 18, 1965
| First extra-vehicular activity
| USSR
| Voskhod 2 | >July 14, 1965
| First Mars flyby (closest approach 9,846 kilometers)
| USA-NASA
| Mariner 4 | >December 15, 1965
| First orbital rendezvous (parallel flight, no docking)
| USA-NASA
| Gemini 6A/Gemini 7 | February 3, 1966
| First soft landing on another world (the Moon)
First photos from another world | USSR | Luna 9 | >March 1, 1966
| First impact into another planet (Venus)
| USSR
| Venera 3 | >March 16, 1966
| First orbital rendezvous (docking)
| USA-NASA
| Gemini 8/Agena target vehicle | >April 3, 1966
| First artificial satellite around another world (the Moon)
| USSR
| Luna 10 | >June 2, 1966
| soft landing on the Moon
photos from the Moon
| USA-NASA
| Surveyor 1 | >April 23, 1967
| First spaceflight casualty
| USSR
| Soyuz 1 | >October 30, 1967
| First unmanned rendezvous with docking
| USSR
| Cosmos 186/Cosmos 188 | >December 21, 1968
| First human orbiting of another celestial body (Moon)
| USA-NASA
| Apollo 8 | >January 16, 1969
| First manned docking and exchange of crew
| USSR
| Soyuz 4/Soyuz 5 | >July 21, 1969
| First humans on the Moon and first space launch from a celestial body
| USA-NASA
| Apollo 11 | >November 19, 1969
| First rendezvous on the surface of a celestial body
| USA-NASA
| Apollo 12/Surveyor 3 | >September 24, 1970
| First automatic sample return from the Moon
| USSR
| Luna 16 | >November 23, 1970
| First lunar rover
| USSR
| Lunokhod 1 | >December 12, 1970
| First X-ray orbital observatory
| USA-NASA
| Uhuru (satellite) | December 15, 1970
| First soft landing on another planet (Venus)
First signals from another planet | USSR | Venera 7 | >April 23, 1971
| First space station
| USSR
| Salyut 1 | >June, 1971
| First Manned orbital observatory
| USSR
| Orion 1 | >November 14, 1971
| Mars]])
| USA-NASA
| Mariner 9 | >November 27, 1971
| First impact into Mars
| USSR
| Mars 2 | December 2, 1971
| First soft Mars landing
First signals from Mars surface | USSR | Mars 3 | >March 3, 1972
| First human made object sent on escape trajectory away from the Sun
| USA-NASA
| Pioneer 10 | >July 15, 1972
| First mission to enter the asteroid belt and leave inner solar system
| USA-NASA
| Pioneer 10 | >December 3, 1973
| First Jupiter flyby (at 130,000 km)
| USA-NASA
| Pioneer 10 | >February 5, 1974
| Venus flyby at 5768 kilometers, first gravitational assist manoeuvre
| USA-NASA
| Mariner 10 | >March 29, 1974
| First Mercury flyby at 703 kilometers
| USA-NASA | Mariner 10 | >July 15, 1975
| First multinational manned mission
| USSR USA-NASA
| Apollo-Soyuz Test Project |
Organization, funding, and economic impactThe 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 29 July 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. When it began operations on 1 October 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 (NACA). While its predecessor, NACA, operated on a US$ | |
