Essay On The Space Race

From the outbreak of World War II in 1939 to the end of the Cold War in 1991 an unprecedented expansion in the development of Science occurred that greatly shaped the world as we know it today. Furthermore, all but a few of the 20th century’s greatest inventions and scientific breakthroughs came in this 52-year period as great sums of money was pumped into the scientific field mainly with the aim to improve each Nations own military strength. As countries made militarily based scientific breakthroughs it also heralded a new era of digital improvement as more and more of everyday life would become entwined with the new technological world that had been sparked primarily by the need for countries to advance above each other militarily, and so

It put the USA’s and the USSR’s space/rocket development programs up against each other to put the first man in space and then onto the moon. The Space Race had its roots in the Arms Race and the Nuclear Rocket Program. As more and more money was piled into the Race it finally bore fruit for the Soviets on October 4, 1957, “a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit” (The Space Race). The Americans put their own up the following year, Explorer 1, in the next 12 years’ great steps would be made in the field of Rocket propulsion systems and man would go into space, finally culminating with Neal Armstrong landing on the Moon in 1969. All these steps in Space exploration would never have been possible if the USA and USSR had not been continuously trying to improve on their own rocket systems in order to get ahead of each other in the Cold War. With leading rocket scientists such as the Head of the Soviet program Sergei Korolev and the USA’s Wernher von Braun leading the way in new Scientific