Space Race

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Space Race was a contest between two superpowers that began not in the stars but deep underground, in the firing pits of missile test ranges. When the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear weapon in August 1949, the United States lost its monopoly on atomic power. Within a few years, both nations were racing to build rockets capable of delivering warheads across continents. The technology that could obliterate a city could, with a different payload, carry a satellite into orbit. That double nature, weapon and wonder at once, shaped everything that followed.

  Public imagination caught fire before any rocket left the launchpad. In October 1951, Soviet engineer Mikhail Tikhonravov published an article called "Flight to the Moon" in the youth newspaper Pionerskaya pravda. He described a two-person interplanetary spaceship and closed with a forecast that the dream of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky would be realized "within the next 10 to 15 years." American readers found their own version of that dream in Collier's magazine, which ran a seven-part series from March 1952 to April 1954 detailing Wernher von Braun's plans for crewed spaceflight. Then in March 1955, Disney broadcast an animated episode called "Man in Space" to an audience of about 40 million people, raising government interest on both sides.

  The formal competition opened on the 29th of July 1955, when President Eisenhower's press secretary announced American plans to launch small Earth-circling satellites for the International Geophysical Year. Five days later, at a conference in Copenhagen, Soviet scientist Leonid Sedov told international reporters his country would launch a satellite in the "near future." What followed over the next two decades would send the first artificial moon into orbit, the first human around the Earth, and finally two American astronauts to the surface of the Moon, in July 1969. The questions worth asking are not just what happened, but why it happened the way it did, and what it cost.

• 2. Rockets from Ruins

  ›

  Sergei Korolev's path to the R-7 began not at a drawing board but in a labor camp. Joseph Stalin's Great Purge from 1936 to 1938 severely damaged Soviet rocket research, which had been comparable to Germany's through the early 1930s. Korolev himself had been among those detained. By 1945, the Soviet Union captured several key Nazi German rocket production facilities and brought some German engineers home, including concepts proposed by Helmut Gröttrup on Gorodomlya Island that would prove decisive: rigorous weight saving and a reduced thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.4, rather than the conventional factor of 2.

  Korolev and engine designer Valentin Glushko first reconstructed the captured German A-4, producing the Soviet copy called the R-1, which entered service on the 28th of November 1950. The R-2, with a range of 600 km, followed into service in November 1951. By 1951, the R-5 Pobeda, with a range of 1,200 km and capable of carrying a 1 megaton thermonuclear warhead, was under development, entering service in 1955. Design work began in 1953 on the R-7 Semyorka, which required a launch mass of 170 to 200 tons, a range of 8,500 km, and a warhead of 3,000 kg, later raised to 5.5 to 6 tons when planners increased the warhead's mass to accommodate a larger thermonuclear bomb.

  The R-7 flew its design trajectory of 6,000 km on the 21st of August 1957, becoming the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Two months later, a modified version carried Sputnik 1 into orbit. The CIA, watching from the outside, estimated the Soviet rocket's launch weight at 500 metric tons requiring over 1,000 tons of thrust. The actual figures were 267 metric tons and 410 tons of thrust. That miscalculation traced directly to the Agency's own Atlas rocket, which weighed only 82 metric tons. The CIA had in fact heard the correct parameters from Gröttrup as early as January 1954 but had not taken him seriously.

  America's rocket lineage ran through a different set of German hands. Wernher von Braun and most of his engineering team arrived in the United States under Operation Paperclip in 1945, sent first to the Army's White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. Their assembled V-2s produced the first photos of Earth from space and, in 1949, the first two-stage rocket. The team moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950, where von Braun began developing the Redstone missile. By 1957, a descendant of the Air Force's MX-774 program had evolved into the Atlas-A, the first successful American ICBM. WD-40, the rust-prevention compound, was developed specifically to protect Atlas rockets and eliminate the weight of rust-resistant paint.

• 3. Sputnik and the Crisis It Made

  ›

  Korolev's decision to launch on the 4th of October 1957, was partly a competitive reaction to what he thought von Braun had already done. Word reached him that von Braun had launched a Jupiter-C that September 1956, and Korolev mistakenly believed it had been a satellite attempt that failed. He expedited plans, scaled back his ambitious Object D satellite, which weighed 1,400 kg and carried 300 kg of scientific instruments, and built instead a far simpler craft, the Prosteishy Sputnik, or PS-1: a metallic sphere of 83.8 kg with a diameter of 58 cm and two radio transmitters.

  The launch took place at exactly 10:28:34 pm Moscow time, from Soviet missile base Tyura-Tam. Celebrations at the launch control center were muted until the down-range tracking station at Kamchatka picked up the distinctive beep of the satellite's radio transmitters, confirming it had completed its first pass. About 95 minutes after launch, Sputnik 1 flew over its own launch site and the engineers and military personnel below heard it for themselves.

  Western reaction was swift and embarrassing for the United States. Economist Bernard Baruch published an open letter in the New York Herald Tribune titled "The Lessons of Defeat," accusing the US of devoting its industrial power to new car models and gadgets while the Soviet Union reached for the Moon. Eisenhower ordered the Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard program to accelerate, and the 6th of December 1957 launch attempt at Cape Canaveral exploded seconds after liftoff. The satellite appeared in newspapers under the names Flopnik, Stayputnik, Kaputnik, and Dudnik. The Soviet delegate at the United Nations offered the United States technical assistance "under the Soviet program of technical assistance to backwards nations."

  Only after that public failure did Eisenhower allow von Braun's team to proceed. On the 31st of January 1958, von Braun's Juno I rocket launched Explorer 1, a 30.66 lb satellite whose instruments, designed by Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, discovered a doughnut-shaped zone of high radiation around the Earth above the magnetic equator. That zone took his name: the Van Allen radiation belt. Sputnik 1 had triggered the creation of NASA itself. On the 29th of July 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, converting the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics into NASA, with Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson having guided the legislation through Congress.

• 4. The First Humans in Space

  ›

  On the 12th of April 1961, the Soviet Union surprised the world when Yuri Gagarin completed a single 108-minute orbit of the Earth in Vostok 1. The mission had been designed with profound caution: Gagarin's capsule flew in automatic mode because doctors did not know what weightlessness would do to a human being. He carried an envelope containing the code that would unlock manual controls only in an emergency. After landing, Moscow and other cities held mass demonstrations that the Soviets described as second in scale only to the World War II Victory Parade of 1945.

  The Vostok spacecraft itself was built on the same bus as the Zenit spy satellite, which forced the Soviets to hide its true appearance for years. At the July 1961 Tushino air show, the craft was displayed mounted on its launch vehicle with a nose cone in place, concealing the spherical capsule. A tail section with eight fins was added to confuse Western observers. The Soviets did not reveal Vostok's actual appearance until the April 1965 Moscow Economic Exhibition.

  Three weeks after Gagarin's flight, on the 5th of May 1961, Alan Shepard launched on Mercury-Redstone 3 in a spacecraft he named Freedom 7, becoming the first American in space. Though his flight was suborbital, Shepard was the first person to exercise manual control over a spacecraft's attitude and retro-rocket firing. President Kennedy awarded him the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Nearly a year later, on the 20th of February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, completing three orbits in Friendship 7 before a tense reentry caused by what appeared from telemetry to be a loose heat shield. Glenn received a ticker-tape parade in New York City described as reminiscent of the one given to Charles Lindbergh.

  The first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, launched on Vostok 6 on the 16th of June 1963. She was a parachutist and factory worker, not a military test pilot like the male cosmonauts. The head of cosmonaut training had chosen her group after reading a tabloid article about the Mercury 13 women who wanted to become astronauts, mistakenly believing NASA was genuinely pursuing that idea. Five months after her flight, Tereshkova married Vostok 3 cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev.

• 5. Tragedy on Both Sides

  ›

  the 27th of January 1967 fell on the same day the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Outer Space Treaty. That night, during a ground test at Cape Canaveral, a fire swept through the cabin of the Apollo 1 spacecraft, killing the entire crew: Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger Chaffee. Investigators concluded the fire was probably caused by an electrical spark that spread rapidly through the spacecraft's atmosphere of pure oxygen, held at greater than one standard atmosphere of pressure. The crew could not open the plug door hatch against the internal pressure.

  The investigation found design and construction flaws, procedural failures, and a systematic underestimation of the hazard of pure oxygen as a cabin atmosphere. Correcting all of those flaws required twenty-two months before another piloted Apollo flight could be made. Grissom had been a favored choice of NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations, Deke Slayton, to make the first piloted Moon landing.

  Less than three months later, on the 24th of April 1967, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first in-flight spaceflight fatality when Soyuz 1 crashed during emergency reentry. Problems had begun almost immediately after launch when a solar panel failed to unfold, depleting the spacecraft's power. By orbit 13, the automatic stabilization system was entirely dead and the manual system only partially functional. During the emergency descent, the primary parachute failed and the reserve chute tangled with the drogue, driving the descent speed as high as 40 m/s. Soyuz 1 impacted the ground 3 km west of Karabutak and was found on fire. The official autopsy recorded Komarov's cause of death as blunt force trauma.

  In the years afterward, stories circulated in the United States that Komarov had cursed the engineers and Soviet leadership in final transmissions received by an NSA listening station near Istanbul. Historians including Asif Siddiqi have noted that these accounts contradict Soviet radio transcripts. What is not in dispute is that both catastrophes imposed a pause on crewed spaceflight for each nation, and that neither the Soviet Union's secrecy nor America's public accountability could prevent the same kind of disaster.

• 6. Racing to the Moon

  ›

  Kennedy's decision to pursue a Moon landing before the end of the 1960s was not a product of lifelong enthusiasm. His science advisor Jerome Wiesner of MIT, who personally opposed sending humans to space, later recalled that Kennedy would have abandoned a large space program if he could have done so without political cost. As late as March 1961, Kennedy rejected NASA administrator James Webb's budget request for a Moon landing before 1970 as too expensive. Gagarin's flight changed the calculus. The Bay of Pigs invasion, which had failed catastrophically within days of the Soviet launch, compounded the pressure. Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon Johnson on the 20th of April 1961, asking him to assess which space goals America could still win.

  Johnson consulted von Braun, who framed his answer around rocket lifting capability. The Moon landing, von Braun argued, was far enough in the future that the United States had a fighting chance. Kennedy committed publicly on the 25th of May 1961, in a speech before Congress titled "Special Message on Urgent National Needs," asking the nation to send a man to the Moon and return him safely before the decade's end. He rallied public support again on the 12th of September 1962, before a large crowd at Rice University Stadium in Houston, Texas, near the construction site of what would become the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.

  The Soviet government secretly pursued two competing crewed lunar programs. Soviet Decree 655-268, issued in August 1964, directed Vladimir Chelomei to develop a Moon flyby program with a projected first flight by the end of 1966, and directed Korolev to develop the Moon landing program with a first flight by the end of 1967. After Korolev's death on the 14th of January 1966, a February 1967 decree moved those targets later still. Historian Asif Siddiqi described Korolev's career as marking "the absolute zenith of the Soviet space program, one never, ever attained since."

  The Soviet N1 rocket, designed to carry a single cosmonaut to the lunar surface in the LK lander, exceeded the Saturn V's takeoff thrust by 28 percent, at 45,400 kN versus 33,000 kN. But its first flight ended in a catastrophic explosion 70 seconds in, caused by a fire in the first-stage Block A traced to a loose bolt. The Saturn V, by contrast, used liquid hydrogen in its two upper stages and carried 140.6 metric tons to orbit, enough for a three-person orbiter and two-person lander. Apollo 11 achieved Kennedy's goal in July 1969. The United States went on to land five more Apollo crews on the Moon while the Soviet Union eventually cancelled its lunar program and turned to the Salyut space station program and the first robotic landings on Venus and Mars.

• 7. From Competition to Cooperation

  ›

  Nikita Khrushchev's public silence on Kennedy's Moon challenge masked a private ambivalence. When Kennedy proposed in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on the 20th of September 1963, that the two superpowers join forces on a lunar mission, Khrushchev initially rejected the idea. On the 2nd of October 1997, Khrushchev's son Sergei reported that his father had been poised to accept the proposal at the moment of Kennedy's assassination on the 22nd of November 1963. After Kennedy's death, Khrushchev reportedly concluded he lacked the same level of trust in Lyndon Johnson and dropped the idea.

  The shift from rivalry to cooperation came gradually. An April 1972 agreement established the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, leading to a July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit between an American astronaut crew and a Soviet cosmonaut crew. The mission also produced a shared international docking standard, APAS-75. Many observers count this mission as the formal end of the Space Race, though competition did not evaporate overnight.

  The Soviet Union's eventual collapse removed the political engine that had driven the contest. In 1993, the United States and the newly reconstituted Russian Federation agreed on the Shuttle-Mir and International Space Station programs, replacing four decades of rivalry with a framework of shared infrastructure. The Outer Space Treaty, signed by the US, USSR, and United Kingdom on the 27th of January 1967, and in force from October 10 of that year, had already committed both nations to the principle that outer space belonged to no single country. As of its signing, 107 member states had joined the treaty. The R-7 rocket family, which had launched Sputnik 1, remains in service today and is considered the world's most reliable space launcher.