Page 39 - All About History - Issue 38-16

Bluffer’s Guide
14 NOVEMBER, 1971 15 JULY 1975
Mariner 9 achieves
the feat of
becoming the
rst turning point in the Valentina Tereshkova
spacecraft to orbit
another planet as
it narrowly beats
the Soviet e orts to
navigate Mars. the Space Race.
038-039_AAH038_BluffersGuide.indd 39
THE SPACE RACE
What was it?
As the dust settled on the most destructive war in
human history, the competition between the two
greatest superpowers on Earth was hotting up. What
became known as the Space Race represented the rivalry
between the United States of America and the Soviet
Union at its most intense, and the USSR began in the
ascendency, successfully launching Sputnik I, the world’s
first artificial satellite.
The USA responded with Explorer I, which discovered
the existence of magnetic radiation belts around the
Earth. However, at 6.07am on 12 April 1961, the Space Race
moved up a gear as Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the
first man in space.
With this accomplishment, the communist USSR was
seemingly winning out against capitalist USA, but the
biggest achievement was still to come. Astronaut Neil
Armstrong uttered the now immortal (and commonly
misquoted) line: “One small step for a man,” on 20 July
1969 and became the first man to walk on the Moon. The
Space Race eventually began to wind down in the 1970s
and fundamentally ended in July 1975 with the launch of
the first US•Soviet joint space flight, Apollo-Soyuz.
Why did it happen?
The Space Race was just one element of the political
and ideological struggle that was the Cold War. With
the threat of Nazi Germany now out of the picture,
the USA and USSR experienced an escalating hostility
between what were now the two most powerful nations
on Earth. Away from the Korean War and the Cuban
Missile Crisis, another conflict was being fought for
technological supremacy. The superior of these undeclared
enemies would help decide whether communism or
capitalism was the ideology best suited to invent and
provide modern technology. From Sputnik I to Apollo
11, both NASA and the Soviet space program pumped
millions into their respective agencies, achieving huge
feats in the process. The near two-decade-long rivalry
was one of the most captivating altercations between
the East and West and was a vehicle that caught public
imagination and whipped up support for each superpower.
Who was involved?
Alexei Leonov
1934-present
Leonov became the first person to space
walk when he stepped out of the Voskhod
3KD Spacecraft on 18 March 1965.
Neil Armstrong
1930 2012
Neil Armstrong will forever be etched into
the history books for being the first man on
the Moon.
The joint USA USSR
mission represents a
notoriously frosty 1937-present
relations between The first civilian to fly in space, Tereshkova
the two nations,
marking the end of had no pilot training prior to being launched
into orbit aboard Vostok 6.
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