7 Completion of Vostok and Mercury programs.6 Kennedy directs the race toward the Moon.It has also sparked increases in spending on education and research and development, which led to beneficial spin-off technologies. The Space Race has left a legacy of Earth communications and weather satellites, and continuing human space presence on the International Space Station. The end of the Space Race is harder to pinpoint than its beginning, but it was over by the December, 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, after which true spaceflight cooperation between the US and Russia began. The USSR tried but failed manned lunar missions, and eventually cancelled them and concentrated on Earth orbital space stations.Ī period of détente followed with the April 1972 agreement on a co-operative Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew. The race peaked with the JUS landing of the first humans on the Moon with Apollo 11. The Soviet Union beat the US to this, with the Octoorbiting of Sputnik 1, and later beat the US to the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. The competition began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Space Race spawned pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, unmanned space probes of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and symbolic of ideological superiority. It had its origins in the missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations that occurred following World War II, enabled by captured German rocket technology and personnel.
The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), for supremacy in spaceflight capability. Stafford and cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov shake hands in space to ease cold war tensions. The United States led during the "Moon race" by landing Neil Armstrong (pictured) and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, July 1969.Īstronaut Thomas P. The Soviet Union achieved an early lead in the space race by launching the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1 (replica) in 1957. For other uses of the term, see Space Race (disambiguation). This article is about the Cold War competition between the United States and Soviet Union.
0 kommentar(er)
