Space Race

The Space Race was the contest between the United States and the Soviet Union to be first in space. It grew out of the Cold War and out of the missiles both sides were building to carry nuclear warheads: a rocket that could throw a bomb across the ocean could also throw a satellite into orbit, and each first in space was read as proof of which system, communism or capitalism, was ahead. It began in earnest on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, a metal sphere whose radio beep could be heard around the world. Americans were shocked; the Soviets had beaten them with a rocket powerful enough to reach the United States.

For the next few years the Soviet Union kept winning. Sputnik 2 carried the dog Laika a month later. The United States answered with Explorer 1 in January 1958, which found the radiation belts around the Earth, and created NASA that October. Then, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, circling the Earth once in 108 minutes. Alan Shepard followed three weeks later on a fifteen-minute hop that did not reach orbit. The Soviets also sent up the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963, and made the first spacewalk, by Alexei Leonov, in 1965.

Gagarin's flight pushed President Kennedy to raise the stakes. On May 25, 1961, he asked Congress to commit the country to landing a man on the Moon and bringing him home before the end of the decade, and at Rice University in 1962 he explained why: not because it was easy, but because it was hard. Neither side yet had a rocket big enough. The United States built the Saturn V through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes, step by step, and paid for it with a budget that at its peak took more than four cents of every federal dollar. It also paid in lives: three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire on the launch pad in January 1967, and the Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died that April when his Soyuz crashed.

The race was decided in 1969. Apollo 8 had orbited the Moon at Christmas 1968 and sent back the photograph of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility and walked on the Moon while an estimated 650 million people watched on television. Five more Apollo crews landed; the last, Apollo 17, left the Moon in December 1972. The Soviet Moon rocket, the N1, failed on all four of its test flights, and the Soviet programme turned instead to space stations and robot probes to Venus and Mars.

Competition gave way to cooperation. In July 1975 an Apollo and a Soyuz docked in orbit and their commanders, Thomas Stafford and Alexei Leonov, shook hands through the hatch, the moment most historians take as the end of the race. What it left behind is everywhere: weather, communications and navigation satellites, the integrated circuits and computers that Apollo demanded, and the picture of the whole Earth as one small place. Twelve people have walked on the Moon, all of them American, all between 1969 and 1972, and the Russian and American programmes that once raced each other have shared a space station since the 1990s.