When Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon in July 1969, people all over the world watched and celebrated the achievement as a "giant leap for mankind."¹ However, Americans were extra-happy. Not only had they accomplished "the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history"² by putting a man on the Moon, they had also won the Space Race! 

The Space Race? What's that? 

In 1962, American President, John F. Kennedy, announced that it was his aim to put a man on the moon and return him home safely by the end of the century. But, why did he want to do this? He explained that he wanted to do it because it would be hard. It would be a challenge. And why did he want to do something that would be a challenge? It was because he wanted to prove to the world - and to one country in particular - that the USA is the world's greatest superpower. To understand why landing a man on the moon and getting him back home was so important in proving this, we need to go even further back in time. Back to the Second World War.

In 1944, a new weapon was launched which would change the face of warfare forever. It would also later begin man's voyage into space. The supersonic V2 rocket was Hitler's secret weapon. It could be launched from mainland Europe and within six minutes, land in Britain, the main target of Germany, causing huge amounts of damage. Over 5,000 of these rockets were fired at Britain and 1,100 reached the country. They killed 2,724 people, and seriously injured over 6,000. Realising that these rockets could play an extremely important role in future wars, the Americans were keen to get their hands on them. When the war had ended, troops from the United States went to the German V2 factories, and shortly afterwards, the German inventor of the V2 rocket, Wernher von Braun and his engineers, began working for the US Army. Captured rocket parts were reassembled and test launches of them took place in New Mexico. They went so high into the sky that cameras on Earth were unable to see them, so cameras were fitted to the rockets. (The cameras used on the rockets were developed by the same person who discovered Pluto in 1929, Clyde Tombaugh!) After leaving the German weapon factories, the Americans destroyed as many of the weapons of mass destruction as they could so that the Soviet Union couldn't get to them. The Soviet Union (or the USSR) was what is now Russia, plus a few other countries which have since broken away from Russia. Throughout this page, it will be known as the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, America and the Soviet Union fought on the same side. So, why would the Americans be so frightened of the Soviet Union also getting hold of the rockets? The answer is simply that the only reason they fought on the same side is that they both had the same enemy: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi supporters. The two countries, America and The Soviet Union, had a heavy distrust of each other.

The situation between the two countries was quite complex, but the main reason for America and The Soviet Union to have a distrust of each other was because of different beliefs in the ways the countries operated. The table below shows you some of these differences.

The problem lay with the fact that both countries were alien to each other, and that what one country stood for, the other opposed. The Soviet Union was Communist, whereas America was, and still is, anti-Communist. Communism is basically the belief that a country's wealth should be shared equally amongst its people. Anti-communism (Capitalism) is basically the belief that people earn wealth individually according to whether they work, how hard they work and what their job is. Another reason for the distrust was that, during the Second World War, the Soviet Union had a huge army (the Red Army) whereas the Americans had secretly developed the "A" bomb, the most powerful weapon in the world. It was basically a case of one country saying "We've got a bigger army than you have" and "well, we've got something that you don't have." This idea combined with the distrust was the basis to The Cold War. The Cold War was a war where the two countries involved never actually fought against each other (but sometimes fought against other countries that supported their enemy's beliefs) but there was always a threat that if things did get out of hand, one country could in fact, begin the war to end all wars. So, during the Second World War and especially after it, America and the Soviet Union became involved in a battle to out-do the other and to demonstrate which was actually the most powerful country. So, the Americans getting the the V2 rocket factory first and employing the inventor of the V2 gave them the ability to develop more sophisticated and threatening weapons. However, the Soviets did eventually turn up at the German rocket factory and took away any items they could find useful. They made it their job to understand the technology and to launch their own rockets. By the end of the 1940s, rocket launches from the Soviet Union were regular, with the heights they were attaining getting greater and greater. Cameras were attached to the rockets which went high into the Earth's atmosphere. Some films survived from when the rockets landed back on Earth's surface which showed for the first time ever the Earth from space. The arc of Earth could be made out, as could the planet's thin atmosphere. 

On 4th October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Sputnik was the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth. It was about the size of a basketball, weighed 183 pounds and took about 98 minutes to orbit Earth. It didn't actually do anything, other than send a "beep" signal back to Earth. But, the fact that the satellite was launched successfully and entered into orbit was much more significant than what it did when it was there. It sent a threatening signal to the world. If the Soviet Union could launch satellites, surely it could send ballistic missiles containing nuclear weapons from Europe to America. On November 3rd of that year, Sputnik II was launched. Laika the dog was sent into space on Sputnik II and became the first SpaceDog. BobsDog is second!. 

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