The Cold War: The Space Race In The United States
The Space Race
After fighting alongside each other in the Second World War to defeat a common enemy, differing political ideologies resulted in high tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
The Soviet communist government, initiated during the Bolshevik Revolution, posed a direct threat to the goal of the United States to spread democracy and capitalism across the globe.
These rising tensions manifested themselves in the form of the Cold War-a series of conflicts and antagonism between the two nations that did not involve any direct warfare between the two opposing powers but surprisingly lasted for more than thirty years. In the United States it can be known as lasting for nine presidential administrations from Truman until the …show more content…
After the initial satellite launches and the creation of government-funded space programs the competition of the Space Race only continued to increase. 1959 was highlighted by the first-ever space probe to land on the surface of the moon, this probe was of Soviet manufacture.
The 1960s were characterized by a competition to send living beings into space. This started with the 1957 orbit around Earth by a dog named Laika in a Soviet spacecraft (Barksdale), and was succeeded by the Soviets’ successful mission to send a human being, Yuri Gagarin, in orbit around Earth in 1961(“Space Race”). The following year, John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit around the planet and the Apollo project to send a man on the moon had commenced (“Space Race”). According to the History Channel, “December 1968 saw the launch of Apollo 8, the first manned space mission to orbit the moon... On July 16, 1969, U.S. …show more content…
He did so, through a series of letters he sent in 1957 and 1958 to the Soviet leadership, first to Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin and then to Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Eisenhower suggested creating a process to secure space for peaceful uses. Khrushchev, however, rejected the offer and demanded the United States eliminate its forward-based nuclear weapons in places, like Turkey, as a precondition for any space agreement. (Sagdeev, Eisenhower). Eisenhower’s initial inability to create a peaceful multinational space exploration endeavor consisting of the U.S.S.R. and the United States is a possible cause for the extreme competition of the Space
After fighting alongside each other in the Second World War to defeat a common enemy, differing political ideologies resulted in high tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
The Soviet communist government, initiated during the Bolshevik Revolution, posed a direct threat to the goal of the United States to spread democracy and capitalism across the globe.
These rising tensions manifested themselves in the form of the Cold War-a series of conflicts and antagonism between the two nations that did not involve any direct warfare between the two opposing powers but surprisingly lasted for more than thirty years. In the United States it can be known as lasting for nine presidential administrations from Truman until the …show more content…
After the initial satellite launches and the creation of government-funded space programs the competition of the Space Race only continued to increase. 1959 was highlighted by the first-ever space probe to land on the surface of the moon, this probe was of Soviet manufacture.
The 1960s were characterized by a competition to send living beings into space. This started with the 1957 orbit around Earth by a dog named Laika in a Soviet spacecraft (Barksdale), and was succeeded by the Soviets’ successful mission to send a human being, Yuri Gagarin, in orbit around Earth in 1961(“Space Race”). The following year, John Glenn became the first American astronaut to orbit around the planet and the Apollo project to send a man on the moon had commenced (“Space Race”). According to the History Channel, “December 1968 saw the launch of Apollo 8, the first manned space mission to orbit the moon... On July 16, 1969, U.S. …show more content…
He did so, through a series of letters he sent in 1957 and 1958 to the Soviet leadership, first to Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin and then to Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Eisenhower suggested creating a process to secure space for peaceful uses. Khrushchev, however, rejected the offer and demanded the United States eliminate its forward-based nuclear weapons in places, like Turkey, as a precondition for any space agreement. (Sagdeev, Eisenhower). Eisenhower’s initial inability to create a peaceful multinational space exploration endeavor consisting of the U.S.S.R. and the United States is a possible cause for the extreme competition of the Space