Space Race
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Space Race
Beginning in the 1950s, space would become another dramatic arena for these competitions. The space race was mainly between Russia and the United States. Each side sought to prove the excellence of its technology, prove military firework and by its political economic system. The space race improved the United States by becoming more technologically advanced, learning more about space, and by wining the Space Race.
In 1948, the Hale Telescope was completed at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, California. (Bart Jones,2009) The telescope had 200 a inch mirror and it weighed about fourteen and a half tons. The Hale Telescope was the largest instrument in that time and it allowed visual acuity in the study of comets, asteroids, and distant galaxies.
On October 4, 1957, Russia launched the spacecraft Sputnik. Sputnik means “fellow world traveler” in English. (Bart Jones, 2009) The sputnik was the first spacecraft to reach Earths orbit. The launching of Sputnik marked the beginning of the Space Age and the Space Race.
In Americas response of the Sputnik, the United States released the Navy Vanguard Satellite. This was a program managed by the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), which intended to launch the first artificial satellite into Earth orbit using a Vanguard rocket as the launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral Missile Annex, Florida. (Bart Jones, 2009) With cameras filming it rose four feet in the air, then collapsed into a ball of flames. Because of this, it became known as “Flopnik”.
January 31, 1958, a month after Sputniks launch, the Soviets sent another Satellite into space. In this satellite, there was a dog aboard. The United States response was the launch of Explorer 1. This was a successful launch of a satellite. Three years later, the United States sent up a Chimpanzee named Ham in a satellite. Ham was known as a “Chimponaut” This was known as Project Mercury.
The fear that the United States was loosing the Space Race galvanized America behind the space program. Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act (1958), which created NASA. In May 1961, JFK declared grand vision of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
July 16, 1969 United States astronauts Neil Armstrong,