![]() To American officials, Sputnik, Laika and Gagarin had been embarrassing defeats and they were determined to have the last laugh. With the Cold War at its height, victory in the space race had become a national priority. He realised the dreams of generations who had stared up at the skies, and of the Soviet leadership, desperate for a propaganda coup.Īs the 1960s progressed, however, NASA not only drew level but pulled ahead. And in April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth. In November 1957, Sputnik 2 made Laika the first dog in space, although she died just hours after take off. Over the next few years, though, it was the Russians who led the way in an intensely competitive parallel to the arms race – the space race. In the United States, the reaction was fear and shock: congress rushed to pass the National Defense Education Act, redesigning the school curriculum and authorising $1 billion in extra spending to boost American science and technology. ![]() But the Sputnik programme had become a matter of national pride for its Russian architects, a way of proving that their country had recovered from the war and that the Communist system would triumph over the capitalism of America. Until the late 1950s, Western observers assumed that American technology was far ahead of its Soviet equivalent. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, in October 1957, the Cold War moved into space. And when first blood went to the Russians, after the Sputnik launch in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s space flight four years later, the pressure was on the Americans to follow suit. Victory in the space race – marked by the first satellite, the first astronaut, the first spacewalk or the first lunar landing – would mean a gigantic propaganda coup for the nation that could achieve it. Since the late 1940s, the Western and Communist worlds had been locked in a bitter ideological, economic and military rivalry, a struggle not just of two great power blocs, American and Soviet, but of two systems that both claimed to represent the future of human society. The roots of the space race lay in two distinct sources: first, the extraordinary advances in rocketry made in the first half of the 20th century, often with German scientists at the forefront (notably the V2 designer Wernher von Braun, who went on to design the Apollo programme’s Saturn V rockets) and second, the political passions of the Cold War. The importance of being first to the Moon It was the climax of years of effort and dedication, in which NASA inched steadily closer to our celestial neighbour, driven by the fear that the Soviets would get there first. ![]() What is all too easy to forget about Apollo 11 is that it was the fifth manned spaceflight in NASA’s Apollo programme, and the third to travel to the Moon after Apollo 8 and 10, which had both orbited without landing. It set the seal on years of hard work, inspired not only by technological curiosity and the human thirst for knowledge, but also by the ideological passions of the Cold War. Nazis, magic and McCarthyism: the dark history of early American space exploration.50 beautiful photos of the Moon landing missions from the Project Apollo Archives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |