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Space Race Essay

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The history of space and the space race is essential to the exploration of space in this world. The Cold War gave incentive to the space race. The space race began with the United Socialist Soviet Republic (U.S.S.R.), which launched the Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The Sputnik was the first ever satellite to be set in orbit successfully. This satellite orbited the Earth every 96 minutes and was in orbit for 92 days. While only a month later, when the U.S. had figured out they sent a satellite, the U.S.S.R. launched another satellite called the Sputnik 2, which held a dog named Laika. Although Laika was the first dog in orbit, she died on the way back into the Earth’s atmosphere. Laika was the first mammal to orbit Earth, but there were other …show more content…

realized what the U.S.S.R. was doing and that it could be dangerous, the U.S. sent out its own rocket. This rocket and the second rocket failed. The third rocket that the U.S. sent was a success and was called the Explorer 1 which measured the radiation around and outside the Earth’s atmosphere. This rocket led to the discovery of the Van Allen Belts (Hartono and Greicius). Also at this time, our president John F. Kennedy was excited about the space race and challenged the U.S. to an ambitious goal, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." This goal was very ambitious but the U.S. proved that they would do it when they The USSR sent the Vostok 1, which carried the first ever human to reach space. This man was Yuri Gagarin who remained in orbit for one hour and forty-eight minutes before landing in western Russia. Only a month after that, the U.S. did the same with Alan Shepard. There were many other firsts in the space race like the first journey to Mars, the first journey to the moon, the first walking on the moon by Neil Armstrong, and many others, so the U.S. began an organization called NASA(National Aeronautics and Space Administration) in

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