the space race

Post-Cold War, the USSR and US emerged as the world's top two nations that were full of very knowledgeable and powerful scientists and engineers who were able to come up with clever innovations. The USSR and US were fighting, and they wanted to be able to attack the other country by setting off Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) weapons overseas and using satellites in space to spy on each other. However, they became so competitive with each other that it made both teams become "bad sports" in a way when trying to outfight each other for developing improved technologies, which led them to trying to come up with better strategies for eventually winning the Space Race.

The Russians seemed to be the leading nation for the start and majority of the Race. They fired Sputnik I, which was the first satellite that was successfully sent into space. It was a 184 pound, 60 cm metal sphere that carried a radio transmitter and went into orbit about 550 miles upward, where it was able to rotate around Earth every 1.5 hour at a speed of 18,000 miles per hour. Later on, the Russians became the first to launch a living organism, a female dog named Laika, into space, where she lived there for a week. Countries then realized that if a dog could survive in space, then any animal can survive. This leads the countries to take initiative to achieve the next challenge - sending people to do space exploration. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a Russian astronaut, is sent off into space, therefore successfully proving the hypothesis on how people can go to space. The US is falling behind the Race and experiences difficulty in being able to keep up and advance from the USSR's current achievements.

The ultimate challenge for both nations then becomes for being able to get an expedition to visit the moon. The USSR developed the Luna 1 spacecraft; although it accidentally strayed off its intended route to travel and make a stop at the moon, this was still an important milestone for the Soviets and technology, as they were able to design something that could orbit past Earth and around the sun. The US then realized that there were better alternative paths that their engineers could work on in order to advance past the Soviets, ideally accomplishing something that the USSR had never done before.

However, the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred a few years later, set an obstacle for the US. The Russians were "cheating" in the Race, for they were hiding weapons that were scattered throughout Cuba  so they could attack the nearby US. However because America also had weapons very close to Russia, they realized how destructive it would be if one nation used the weapons, and if the other used them to get revenge -possibly destroying the world. To prevent war, the US moved their weapons away, and this led a period of inactivity.

Weeks later, the intense Race began again, and although America started to gain more momentum to be able to catch up to Russia, they were still not ahead of the game. However, this all changed on July 20, 1969, where finally, the unimaginable had been done: the US has been the first to get people, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, to land on the Moon. From this, both sides realized that because the US had achieved their goal, there was nothing left to compete over. Russia was congratulatory of the US, but many believe that Russia was actually angry at the US for winning the Race, which has continued to create tension between the two countries. Nevertheless, the Space Race ultimately brought upon several new technological advancements in the field of space exploration.