Jabarkan Persaingan ketenteraan di angkasa dari Perlumbaan Angkasa dalam bahasa melayu

Out of view, but no less real a competition, was the drive to develop space for military uses. Well before Sputnik, both the US and USSR were developing plans for reconnaissance satellites. The Soviet Zenith spacecraft, which by the dual-use designed in by Korolev eventually became Vostok, was originally a photoimaging satellite.  It was in competition with the USAF's Discoverer series, of which Discoverer XIII was the first payload recovered from space - one day ahead of the first Soviet recovered payload.

Program-program ketenteraan angkasa utama dibangunkan oleh A.S dan Soviet, often following a pattern whereby the US only completed a mockup before its program ended, while the USSR built, or even orbited, theirs:

Supersonic Intercontinental Cruise Missile: Navaho (test program stopped) vs. Buran cruise missile (plan)

Small Winged Spacecraft: X-20 Dyna-Soar (mockup) vs. MiG-105 (flight-tested)

Satellite Inspection Capsule: Blue Gemini (mockup) vs. Soyuz interceptor (plan)

Military Space Station: MOL (plan) vs. Almaz (flown somewhat modified as Salyut 2, 3, and 5)

Military Capsule with hatch in heat shield: Gemini B (tested crewless in space) vs. Merkur space capsule (flown crewless as part of TKS)

Ferry to Military Space Station: Gemini Ferry (plan) vs. TKS (flown crewless in space, and docked with a Salyut)

The "end" of the Space Race

While the Sputnik 1 launch can clearly be called the start of the Space Race, its end is more debatable. Most hotly contested during the 1960s, the Space Race continued apace through the Apollo moon landing of 1969. Although they followed Apollo 11 with five more manned lunar landings, American space scientists turned to new arenas. Skylab would gather data, and the Space Shuttle would work on returning spaceships intact from space journeys. Americans would claim that by first landing a man on the moon they had won this unofficial "race". Soviet scientists meanwhile pushed ahead with their own projects, and would likely not have conceded anything like defeat. In any event, as the Cold War cooled, and as other nations began to develop their own space programs, the notion of a continuing "race" between the two superpowers became less real.

Both nations had developed manned military space programs. The USAF had proposed using its Titan missile to launch the Dyna-Soar hypersonic glider that would be used to intercept enemy satellites. This was replaced by the Manned Orbiting Laboratory that used hardware based on the Gemini program to carry out surveillance missions, but this was also cancelled. The USSR commissioned the Almaz program, for a similar manned military space station, which merged with the Salyut program.

The Space Race slowed after the Apollo landing, which many observers describe as its apex or even its end. Others, including space historian Carole Scott and Romanian Dr. Florin Pop's Cold War Project, feel its end was most clearly punctuated by the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975. The Soviet craft Soyuz-19 met and docked in space with America's Apollo 18, allowing astronauts from the "rival" nations to pass into each other's ship and participate in combined experimentation. Although each country's endeavors in space persisted, they went largely in different "directions", and the notion of a continuing two-nation "race" was outdated after Apollo-Soyuz.

Organization, funding and the economic impact

The huge expenditures and bureaucracy needed to organize successful space exploration led to the creation of national space agencies. The United States and the Soviet Union developed programs focused solely on the scientific and industrial requirement for these efforts.

On July 29 1958, President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). When it began operations on October 1 1958, NASA consisted mainly of the four laboratories and some 8,000 employees of the government's 46-year-old research agency for aeronautics, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). While its predecessor, NACA, operated on a $5 million budget, NASA funding was rapidly accelerated to $5 billion per year, including huge sums for subcontractors from the private sector. The Apollo 11 moon landing, the high point of NASA's success, was estimated to have cost some $20-25 billion.

Making comparisons of U.S. and Soviet space spending, especially during the Khruschev years, is very difficult. However in 1989, then-Soviet Armed Services Chief of Staff General M. Moiseyev reported that the Soviet Union allocated 6.9 billion rubles (about $4 billion) to its space program that year3. Other Soviet officials estimated that their total manned space expenses totaled about that amount over the entire duration of the programs, with some lower unofficial estimates of about four and half billion rubles. In addition to the murkiness of the figures, such comparisons must also take into account the likely effect of Soviet propaganda, whose goal was to make the Soviet Union look strong and to confuse the Western analysis.

Inefficient organization also plagued the Soviet effort.  The USSR had nothing like NASA (the Russian Aviation and Space Agency was created only in the 1990s). Too many political issues in science, imaginary values instead of real ones, and too many personal views handicapped Soviet progress. Every Soviet chief designer had to stand for his ownideas, looking for the patronage of a communist official.

The Soviets were also operating in the face of a largely impoverished population not enjoying the fruits of the expanding U.S. economy. Eventually the Soviets inefficient economy, organization, and lack of funds led them to lose their early advantage. The high economic cost of the space race, along with the extremely expensive arms race, eventualy deepened the economic crisis of the communist economic system and was one of the factors that lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.