would land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Kennedy made the bold, public claim that the U.S. On May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space (though not in orbit). effort to send a man into space, dubbed Project Mercury, NASA engineers designed a smaller, cone-shaped capsule far lighter than Vostok they tested the craft with chimpanzees and held a final test flight in March 1961 before the Soviets were able to pull ahead with Gagarin’s launch.
In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, traveling in the capsule-like spacecraft Vostok 1.
In 1959, the Soviet space program took another step forward with the launch of Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the moon. Space Race Heats Up: Men (And Chimps) Orbit Earth The second, led by the Central Intelligence Agency ( CIA), the Air Force and a new organization called the National Reconnaissance Office (the existence of which was kept classified until the early 1990s) was code-named Corona it would use orbiting satellites to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union and its allies. Air Force, dedicated itself to exploiting the military potential of space. These tensions would continue throughout the space race, exacerbated by such events as the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the outbreak of war in Southeast Asia.Ģ008 Proposition 8 is passed in California, banning same-sex marriageĮisenhower also created two national security-oriented space programs that would operate simultaneously with NASA’s program. Causes of the Space Raceīy the mid-1950s, the U.S.-Soviet Cold War had worked its way into the fabric of everyday life in both countries, fueled by the arms race and the growing threat of nuclear weapons, wide-ranging espionage and counter-espionage between the two countries, war in Korea and a clash of words and ideas carried out in the media. Beginning in the late 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for this competition, as each side sought to prove the superiority of its technology, its military firepower and–by extension–its political-economic system. Known as the Cold War, this battle pitted the world’s two great powers–the democratic, capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union–against each other. Space Race Heats Up: Men (And Chimps) Orbit EarthĪfter World War II drew to a close in the mid-20th century, a new conflict began.
0 kommentar(er)
