In December, nineteen sixty-eight, the United States launched Apollo 8 with three astronauts. Yet the question remained: which one would be the first to put a man there. The world did not get pictures from the surface of the moon until the Soviet Luna 9 landed there in February, nineteen sixty-six.įor the next few years, both the United States and Soviet Union continued their exploration of the moon. These pictures were made from a distance. There were a number of failures before Ranger 7 took pictures of the moon. The United States planned to explore the moon with its unmanned Ranger spacecraft. This was the side no one on Earth had ever seen. The third of these flights took pictures of the far side of the moon. In January nineteen fifty-nine, the Soviets launched a series of unmanned Luna rockets. The astronauts had made the operation seem easy. The two spacecraft got within one-third of a meter of each other. They needed to get within six hundred meters to be considered successful.Īfter all the problems on the ground, the events in space went smoothly. They got closer and closer to the Gemini ahead of them. The astronauts on the second Gemini moved their spacecraft into higher orbits. By that time, the first one had been in orbit about eleven days. It took two tries to launch the second Gemini. The second one could chase the first one, instead of a satellite. Then someone had an idea: why not launch both Geminis. It would launch the next in its Gemini series. America's space agency decided to move forward. The target satellite exploded as it separated from its main rocket. The plan called for a Gemini spacecraft carrying two astronauts to get close to an unmanned satellite. Docking would be necessary to land men on the moon. This was the first step in getting spacecraft to link, or dock, together. Later that year, nineteen sixty-five, the United States tried to have one spacecraft get very close to another spacecraft while in orbit. Like Leonov, White was sorry when he had to return to his spacecraft. This gave him some control of his movements in space. Astronaut Edward White had a kind of rocket gun. He was having such a good time!Ī little more than two months later, an American would walk outside his spacecraft. And it permitted him to float freely at the other end.Īfter about ten minutes, Leonov had to return to the spacecraft. A strong tether connected Leonov to the spacecraft. In March, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to do so. That flight came in February, nineteen sixty-two, with John Glenn.īy nineteen sixty-five, the United States and the Soviet Union were experimenting to see if humans could survive outside a spacecraft. Shepard remained in space only about fifteen minutes. Less than a month later, the United States sent its first astronaut into space. He landed safely by parachute near a village in Russia. He remained in space for less than two hours. In April nineteen sixty-one, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched in the vehicle known as Vostok. The next major space victory belonged to the Soviets. \Ĭosmonaut Yuri Gagarin before launch in April 1961 This satellite was about the size of a basketball. The Soviets took the first step by creating Sputnik. So, both countries employed German scientists to help them win the race to space. The larger V-2 rocket had the ability to hit the United States.Īfter the war, it became clear that the United States and the Soviet Union - allies in wartime - would become enemies in peacetime. Thousands of people in Britain and Belgium died as a result of V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks. ![]() ![]() Rocket technology improved during World War Two. In nineteen twenty-three, a Romanian student in Germany, Hermann Oberth, showed how a spaceship might be built and launched to other planets. He experimented with small rockets to see how high and how far they could travel. In the early nineteen hundreds, another teacher - American Robert Goddard - tested the idea. A Russian teacher of that time, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, decided that a rocket engine could provide power for a space vehicle. The technology that launched Sputnik probably began in the late nineteenth century. And the Soviet Union had reached outer space first. Many people believed the nation that controlled space could win any war. Sputnik was an important propaganda victory for the Soviets in the Cold War with the United States. The world's first satellite was called Sputnik 1. This first satellite was today successfully launched in the USSR." RADIO MOSCOW: "The first artificial Earth satellite in the world has now been created. On a cold October day in nineteen fifty-seven, the Soviet Union launched a small satellite into orbit around the Earth. STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English.
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