The Space Race

The International Geophysical Year, a worldwide scientific project for 1957–1958, called for artificial satellites to map the Earth. In 1955 the White House announced that the United States would launch one, and the Navy’s Vanguard project was chosen. Space was also a military frontier: rockets that could reach orbit could carry nuclear warheads, and both superpowers saw dominance in space as proof of their system’s superiority.

The contest grew out of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their competing ideologies. Each side wanted to prove its technological and military strength to the world — and the Soviet Union, with powerful rockets developed under the engineer Sergei Korolev, struck first.

Sputnik caught the American public off guard. A month later Sputnik 2 carried a dog, Laika, into orbit; she died soon after launch. The first American attempt, a Vanguard rocket, exploded on its launch pad in December 1957. The Army team under Wernher von Braun then launched Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958; its small instruments discovered the radiation belts around Earth named for the scientist James Van Allen. In July 1958 Eisenhower signed the act creating NASA, which opened for business on October 1.

The Soviets kept scoring firsts. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, orbiting Earth in a flight of an hour and forty-eight minutes. Alan Shepard followed on May 5 with a fifteen-minute suborbital flight, and on May 25 Kennedy told Congress that the nation should commit itself to landing a man on the moon before the decade was out. John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in February 1962. The race had costs: in January 1967 a fire in the Apollo 1 command module killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. In December 1968 Apollo 8 became the first crewed mission to orbit the moon, and on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 landed on its surface.

Sputnik set off a political furor in the United States. Eisenhower refused panicked demands for huge increases in military spending, confident that American defenses remained strong, but the Defense Department approved funding for a second satellite project, and Eisenhower called for a civilian space agency, which became NASA. Kennedy later placed NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Texas, the home state of his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who had headed the Senate subcommittee that funded the space program.

More than a billion people watched the moon landing, and it gave Americans renewed confidence that their system had prevailed in the most visible arena of the Cold War, though tensions on Earth did not ease. The race left a lasting institution in NASA and a tradition of scientific satellites that began with Explorer 1.