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Space Race Thesis

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you Jericho Middle School Race to the Frontier: How the United States Won the Space Race Arav Shelat Social Studies: Period 4 Teacher Name: Michelle Vivante Date Due: December 12, 2022 Thesis "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."- Neil Armstrong In the 1950s the USSR launched a satellite called the Sputnik in space. When the US heard of this they were shocked and began to expedite their efforts to go to space thus starting the Apollo missions. The Apollo missions began in the 1960s as NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) was directly competing with the SSP (Soviet Space Program). With a team of hundreds of scientists, the Apollo missions were successful in the …show more content…

The space race began somewhere around the 1960’s when the USA announced they would put a satellite in Earth's orbit but unfortunately the Soviets won that part of the race when they launched Sputnik 1. In response Edward Teller, the father of the Hydrogen bomb, described the event as, “a greater defeat for our country than Pearl Harbor.” In 1957 the Soviets also accomplished the first ever space walk. With these events, Senator Mike Mansfield stated that what is at stake is nothing more than our survival. One Congressman even quipped that Soviet’s success was just, "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material superiority" Indeed, American superiority itself was being challenged when the Soviets began to enjoy the success of their labors by having frequent success with their space program. Great quotes. You need to remember to add your in-text …show more content…

A NASA space engineer named James Oberg who speaks Russian and has written multiple books about the U.S. and Soviet space programs wrote in Reason Magazine, “Many of the same elements that characterized preparations for the Apollo Moon Landings also showed up in the Soviet program.” Mr. Oberg also noted that Soviet cosmonauts during the 1960s spoke as though they were in a race with the U.S. to the moon citing Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, “I can positively state that the Soviet Union will not be beaten by the United States in the race for a human being to go to the moon.” Komorov added, “The U.S. has a timetable of ‘1969 plus X,’ but our timetable is ‘1969 plus X minus one’!.” implying that the Soviets would make it the moon a year before the

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