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The Space Race was a technological and ideological competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in outer space exploration during the mid-to-late 20th century. The term refers to a specific period in human history, 1957-1975, and does not include subsequent efforts by these or other nations to explore space. The race involved pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, sub-orbital and orbital human spaceflight around the earth, and piloted voyages to the Moon.

The Space Race era occurred during the Cold War, with its origins in the missile-based arms race that arose just after the end of the Second World War; with both the Soviet Union and the United States capturing advanced German rocket technology and personnel. It was motivated by the desire to display scientific and technological superiority, which translated into military strength. It effectively began with the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1 artificial satellite on 4 October 1957, and concluded with the co-operative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project human spaceflight mission in July 1975 as a symbol of the détente between the USA and USSR. In between, it became a focus of the cultural, technological, and ideological rivalry between the two nations. It provided spin-off benefits including unprecedented increases in education funding, and spending on pure research and development that accelerated technological and scientific advancements. An unintended effect was that it also was partially responsible for the birth of the environmental movement. It was during this period that humans first came to see their home-world as it really appears – color pictures from space showed a fragile blue planet bordered by the blackness of space.

Second World War
The Space Race can trace its origins to Nazi Germany, beginning in the 1930s and culminating during World War II when Germany researched and built operational ballistic missiles. Starting in the early 1930s, German aerospace engineers experimented with liquid-fuelled rockets, with the goal that one day they would be capable of reaching high altitudes and traversing long distances. The head of the German Army's Ballistics and Munitions Branch, Lieutenant Colonel Karl Emil Becker, gathered a small team of engineers that included Walter Dornberger and Leo Zanssen, to figure out how to use rockets as long-range artillery in order to get around the Treaty of Versailles' ban on research and development of long-range cannons. Wernher von Braun, a young engineering prodigy, was recruited by Becker and Dornberger to join their secret army program atKummersdorf-West in 1932. Von Braun had romantic dreams about conquering outer space with rockets, and did not initially see the military value in missile technology.

During the Second World War, General Dornberger was the military head of the army's rocket program, Zanssen became the commandant of thePeenemünde army rocket centre, and von Braun was the technical director of the ballistic missile program. They would lead the team that built the Aggregate-4 (A-4) rocket, which became the first vehicle to reach outer space during its test flight program in 1942 and 1943. By 1943, Germany began mass producing the A-4 as the Vergeltungswaffe 2 (“Vengeance Weapon” 2, or more commonly, V2), a ballistic missile with a320 km range carrying a 1130 kg warhead at 4000 km/h. Its supersonic speed meant there was no defense against it, and little warning on detection by radar. Germany used the weapon to bombard southern England and parts of Allied-liberated western Europe from 1944 until 1945. After the war, the A-4 became the basis of early American and Soviet rocket designs.

At war’s end, American, British, and Soviet scientific intelligence teams competed to capture Germany's rocket engineers along with the German rockets themselves and the designs they were based on. Each of the Allies captured a share of the available members of the German rocket team, but the United States benefited the most with Operation Paperclip, recruiting von Braun and most of his engineering team, who later helped develop the American missile and space exploration programs. The United States also acquired a large number of complete V2 rockets.

Rocket teams assembled
With the German rocket center at Peenemünde lying in the Soviet zone of occupation, the Soviet Union sent its best rocket engineers to the eastern part of Germany to see what they could salvage for future weapons systems. The Soviet rocket engineers were led by Sergey Korolyov. He had been involved in space clubs and early Soviet rocket design in the 1930s, but was arrested in 1938 during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge and imprisoned for six years in Siberia. After the war, he became the USSR's chief rocket and spacecraft engineer, essentially the Soviets' counterpart to Von Braun. His identity was kept a state secret throughout the Cold War, and he was identified publicly only as "the Chief Designer." In the west, his name was only officially revealed when he died in 1966.

After almost a year in the area around Peenemünde, Soviet officials moved most of the captured German rocket specialists to Gorodomlya IslandonLake Seliger, about 240 km northwest of Moscow. They were not allowed to participate in Soviet missile design, but were used as problem-solving consultants to the Soviet engineers. They helped in the following areas: consult on creating a Soviet version of the A-4; work on "organizational schemes"; research in improving the A-4 main engine; development of a 100-ton engine; assistance in the "layout" of plant production rooms; and preparation of rocket assembly using German components. With their help, particullarly Helmut Groettrup's group, Korolyov reverse-engineered the A-4 and built his own version of the rocket, the R-1, in 1948. Later, he developed his own distinct designs, though many of these designs were influenced by the Groettrup Group's G4-R10 design from 1949. The Germans were eventually repatriated in 1951-53.

In America, Von Braun and his team were sent to the United States Army's White Sands Proving Ground, located in New Mexico, in 1945. They set about assembling the captured V2s and began a program of launching them and instructing American engineers in their operation. These tests led to the first rocket to take photos from outer space, and the first two-stage rocket, the WAC Corporal-V2 combination, in 1949. The German rocket team was moved from Fort Bliss to the Army's new Redstone Arsenal, located in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950. From here, Von Braun and his team would develop the Army's first operational medium-range ballistic missile, the Redstone rocket, that would, in slightly modified versions, launch both America's first satellite, and the first piloted Mercury space missions. It became the basis for both the Jupiter and Saturn family of rockets.

Cold War
The Cold War (1947-1991) developed immediately following the Second World War between two former allies, the Soviet Union and the United States. It involved a continuing state of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition, primarily between the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, particularly the United States. Although the primary participants' military forces never clashed directly, they expressed this conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, a nuclear arms race, and economic and technological competitions, such as the Space Race.

The Cold War can simplistically be seen as an expression of the ideological struggle between communism and capitalism. The United States faced a new uncertainty beginning in September 1949, when it lost its monopoly on the atomic bomb. American intelligence agencies discovered that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb, with the consequence that the United States potentially could face a future nuclear war that, for the first time, might devastate its cities. Given this new danger, the United States participated in an arms race with the Soviet Union that included development of the hydrogen bomb, as well as intercontinental strategic bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of delivering nuclear weapons. A new fear of communism and its believers swept the United States during the 1950s, which devolved into paranoid McCarthyism. With communism spreading in China, Korea, and Eastern Europe, Americans came to feel so threatened that popular and political culture condoned extensive "witch-hunts" to expose communist spies. Part of the American reaction to the Soviet atomic and hydrogen bomb tests included maintaining a large Air Force, under the control of the Strategic Air Command (SAC). SAC employed intercontinental strategic bombers, as well as medium-bombers based close to Soviet airspace (in western Europe and in Turkey) that were capable of delivering nuclear payloads.

For its part, the Soviet Union harbored well-founded fears of invasion from the west, as it had been invaded several times during the past thousand years, most recently by Nazi Germany in 1941. Having suffered at least 27 million casualties during the World War II, the Soviet Union was wary of its former ally, the United States, which until late 1949 was the sole possessor of atomic weapons. The United States had used these weapons operationally during World War II, and it could use these weapons against the Soviet Union, laying waste its cities and military centers. Since the Americans had a much larger air force than the Soviet Union, and the United States maintained advance air bases near Soviet territory, in 1947 Stalin ordered the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in order to counter the American threat.

In 1953, Korolyov was given the go-ahead to develop the R-7 Semyorka rocket, basically four G4s mated together with a central sustainer stage. It was successfully tested on 21 August 1957 and became the world's first fully operational ICBM the following month. It would later be used to launch the first satellite into space, and derivatives would launch all piloted Soviet spacecraft.

The United States had multiple rocket programs divided among the different branches of the American armed services, which meant that each force developed its own ICBM program. The Air Force initiated ICBM research in 1945 with the MX-774. However, its funding was cancelled and only three partially successful launches were conducted in 1947. In 1951, the Air Force began a new ICBM program called MX-1593, and by 1955 this program was receiving top-priority funding. The MX-1593 program evolved to become the Atlas-A, with its maiden launch occurring on 11 June 1957, becoming the first successful American ICBM. Its upgraded version, the Atlas-D rocket, would later serve as an operational nuclear ICBM and be used as the orbital launch vehicle for Project Mercury and the remote-controlled Agena Target Vehicle used in Project Gemini.

With the Cold War as an engine for change in the ideological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, a coherent space policy began to take shape in the United States during the late 1950s. Korolyov would take much inspiration from the competition as well, achieving many firsts to counter the possibility that the United States might prevail.