Space Race

In October, 1957, the U.S.S.R. embarrassed the United States by being the first to put an unmanned satellite into orbit around the earth, the Sputnik 1. Although the United States had announced its intention to do the same, they were inhibited by Eisenhower’s fear of being thought a warmonger in the tricky post-war atmosphere, as an orbiting satellite might be considered a violation of another nation’s airspace. During the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 several launches established the principal that a nation’s airspace did not extend past the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Eisenhower had also prevented the satellite teams from using military missiles as launchers. After World War II, the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. competed to recruit the German engineers who had developed the V2 rocket. Werner von Braun and his team, recruited by the United States, had sent up rockets capable of launching a satellite. Sergei Korolev, the Soviet’s chief engineer who had been brought back from imprisonment in Siberia, was competing with von Braun. For its civilian satellite programs, however, the U.S. was using Vanguard research-only rockets.

After the success of Sputnik, Eisenhower pushed the Vanguard project to an earlier launch. The spectacular failure of this launch on December 6, 1957 in front of a broadcast television audience, was what finally transferred command of the U.S. launching program to von Braun’s Redstone rocket team. Explorer 1 was successfully launched on January 31, 1958.

Explorer 1

The space race precipitated unprecedented spending on education, which we noticed in our science and math classes and our high school library. We followed all of the space missions avidly. I remember the euphoria of Alan Shepard’s manned space flight in May, 1961, even though it was a month later than the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s flight. I wrote a letter to Alan Shepard and received a handwritten note in response.

John F. Kennedy proposed, in a speech to the United Nations in September 1963, that the United States and the U.S.S.R. cooperate in an effort to put a man on the moon. Khrushchev and Kennedy had achieved a kind of rapport over the years of working together, and it was thought Khrushchev would accept the proposal. When Kennedy was assassinated in November, however, Khrushchev’s trust did not extend to the Johnson administration and the idea was dropped.

The space race is considered to have ended with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975, a cooperative human space flight mission which came to symbolize détente. In studying the space race years later, when the participants have no need to keep secrets, the human faces and decisions emerge.