The Space Race was a competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for supremacy in space exploration from 1957-1975 . The Cold War rivalry between the two nations focused on being firsts in space exploration to show a sign of superiority. The Space Race involved launching satellites, suborbital and orbital human spaceflight around the Earth, and manned flights to the Moon. It first began with the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite on October 4. 1957, and ended with the Apollo-Soyuz human spaceflight mission in July 1975. The Apollo-Soyuz project symbolized an easing in the relationship between the Soviet Union and the US. The Space Race was originally a missile-based arms race that occurred just after the end of the World War 2.
The Space Race all began in Germany during the beginning of the 1930s and continued during World War II when Germany researched and built ballistic missiles. Starting in the early 1930s, German aerospace engineers experimented with liquid-fueled rockets hoping they would be capable of reaching high altitudes and going long distances. The head of the German Army's Ballistics Branch, Lieutenant Colonel Karl Emil Becker, created a team of engineers 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.
At the end of the war, American, British, and Soviet scientific intelligence teams competed to capture Germany's rocket engineers as well as German rocket designs. 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.

In 1955, both the United States and the Soviet Union built ballistic missiles that could be utilized to launch objects into space. The start has just begun. Both nations publicly announced that they would launch artificial Earth satellites by 1957 or 1958. On July 24th, 1955, James C. Hagerty, Dwight D. Eisenhower's press secretary, announced that the United States intended to launch Earth orbiting satellites between July 1st, 1957 and December 31st, 1958.

On October 4th, 1957, at exactly 10:28:34 pm The Sputnik 1 satellite lifted off the launch pad, and eventually was into an orbit a few minutes later. The Soviet Union's success caused public controversy in the United States, and Eisenhower ordered the civilian rocket and satellite project, Vanguard, to move up its timetable and launch its satellite much sooner than originally planned. The December 6th, 1957 Project Vanguard launch ended in a humungous failure, exploding a few seconds after launch, and it became an international joke. The satellite appeared in newspapers with humorous names like Flopnik and Kaputnik. In the United Nations, the Russian delegate offered the U.S. representative aid under the Soviet program of technical assistance to backwards nations.
Nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, von Braun and the United States successfully launched its first satellite, Juno 1. It was given a “civilian” name to not cause any confusion between it and the Army’s “Explorer 1” missile.
The Soviet Union soon got a lead on the United States. On April 21st, 1961, The Soviets launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit on the Vostok 1. He became known as the first cosmonaut or “Sailor of the Universe” On April 20th 1961, American President John F. Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, asking him to look into the state of America's space program, and into programs that could offer NASA the opportunity to catch up. Johnson responded about one week later, concluding that the United States needed to do much more to reach a position of leadership. Johnson recommended that a piloted moon landing was far enough in the future that it was likely that the United States could achieve it first.
On March 18th 1965, about a week before the first American piloted Project Gemini space flight, the Soviet Union accelerated the Space Race competition, by launching the two-cosmonaut Voskhod 2 mission. Voskhod 2's design modifications included the first airlock to allow for entering and exiting the spacecraft, also known as a spacewalk. Alexey Leonov performed the first-ever spacewalk as part of the mission. A fatality was narrowly avoided when Leonov's spacesuit expanded, preventing him from re-entering the spacecraft. He had to improvise, and perform a risky depressurization of his spacesuit in order to re-enter the airlock. He succeeded in safely re-entering the ship, but he and Mitrofan Belyayev had bigger problems when the spacecraft's atmospheric controls flooded the cabin with over 45% oxygen, which had to be lowered to acceptable levels before re-entry. The reentry involved more challenges: a rocket firing with horrible timing caused the Voskhod 2 to land 240 miles off its designated target area.

Apollo 8 launched on December 21st 1968, and became the first human-crewed spacecraft to leave low-Earth orbit and go to another section of the universe, the Moon. On December 24th, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to enter into orbit around the Moon. They orbited ten times, and transmitted one of the most watched TV broadcasts in history, with their Christmas Eve program from lunar orbit, that concluded with a reading from the Biblical Book of Genesis. Just over two days later, on December 27th, Apollo 8 safely splashed down in the Pacific, completing another first: NASA's first dawn splashdown and recovery. It turned out there was no chance of a piloted Soviet circumlunar flight during 1968, due to the unreliability of the Zonds. After the successive launch failures of the N1 rocket in 1969, Soviet plans for a piloted landing suffered first delay and ultimately cancellation. The launch pad explosion of the N-1 on July 3rd 1969 was a significant setback.The rocket hit the pad after an engine shutdown, destroying itself and the launch facility..

1969 saw the final leg of the Moon Race, with the United States leading it after the flight of Apollo 8. It was time to proceed to an actual landing mission. Under this backdrop, Apollo 11 was being prepared for a July encounter with the Moon. The Apollo 11 crew consisted of commander, Neil Armstrong, command module pilot Michael Collins, and lunar module pilot Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. The trip took just over three days. After achieving orbit, Armstrong and Aldrin transferred into the Lunar Module, named Eagle, and began their descent. After overcoming several computer malfunctions, Armstrong took over manual flight-control at about 590 ft, and guided the flight to a landing on the Moon's Sea of Tranquility at 4:17 PM, July 20th 1969. The first humans on the Moon would wait another six hours before they ventured out of their craft. At 10:56:15 PMl , Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon

Work Cited
•Moon Race: U.S. Not Alone in Future Lunar Exploration http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/060426_international_moon.html •The Space Race http://nebraskastudies.org/0900/frameset_reset.html?http://nebraskastudies.org/0900/stories/0901_0105.html
•Space Race Rekindled? Russia Shoots for Moon, Mars http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3550741&page=1