30 Years of Science with the Hubble Space Telescope
Channel: Space Life
Date: 2021-03-01

The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), to achieve superior spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations following World War II. The technological advantage demonstrated by spaceflight achievement was seen as necessary for national security, and became part of the symbolism and ideology of the time. The Space Race led to pioneering launches of artificial satellites, uncrewed space probes to the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and ultimately to the Moon.

The competition began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier to launch an artificial satellite for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviet Union achieved the first successful artificial satellite launch on October 4, 1957 of Sputnik 1, and sent the first human to space with the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. The USSR demonstrated an early lead in the race with these and other firsts over the next few years, including the largest Earth orbital lift capability, flight durations measured in days instead of hours, the first multi-person crewed spaceflight, and the first spacewalk.

But the USSR lost its early lead after US president John F. Kennedy raised the stakes by setting a goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth".[3] American spaceflight capability overtook the Soviets' with long-duration (up to two week) flights; space rendezvous and docking; working outside spacecraft; use of liquid hydrogen fuel in the Saturn family of rockets; and development of the first super heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Saturn V, large enough to send a three-person orbiter and two-person lander to the Moon. Kennedy's Moon landing goal was achieved in July 1969, with the flight of Apollo 11, a singular achievement far outweighing any combination of Soviet achievements. The USSR pursued two crewed lunar programs, but failed to develop a launch vehicle powerful enough to land one human on the Moon before the US, and eventually canceled them to concentrate on Earth orbital space stations, while the US landed five more Apollo crews on the Moon.[8]

A period of détente followed with the April 1972 agreement on a co-operative Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew and joint development of an international docking standard APAS-75. Apollo–Soyuz began a period of transition from the Space Race to an age of US / Russian space cooperation by December 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet Union brought the end of the Cold War and enabled the Shuttle–Mir and International Space Station programs between the US and the newly founded Russian Federation.