History of the U.S. Space Program and the Cold War Space Race

When the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik I, the first ever artificial satellite, into orbit on October 4, 1957, the event took the Americans and the entire Western world by surprise. Sputnik I was just a two-foot sphere carrying nothing more than two tiny radio transmitters, but the symbolic significance of the event — the implication that Communist Russia had taken a significant technological lead over the United States — was a massive blow to American national pride. It signaled the start of the Cold War space race between the two major superpowers of the time and developed into a race to put the first man on the moon, culminating in the historic "giant leap for mankind" on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.

This paper focuses on the history of the U.S. Space Program: the role of the people and agencies responsible for starting and developing the program, how the rivalry with the Soviet Union affected the program, the significance and benefits of space exploration, the future of the space program, and its overall usefulness.

The precursor of the space programs of both the United States and the U.S.S.R. was the rocket development program in Nazi Germany during World War II. After the war, the German engineer Wernher Von Braun — developer of the long-range V-2 rockets used to bomb British cities — led a team that developed a series of rockets in the U.S. that helped launch both the space and the ballistic missile programs. The U.S.S.R. also had a team of German expatriate scientists working on rockets and missiles, which helped the country develop a medium-range ballistic missile by the mid-1950s and the first intercontinental missile by 1957, capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere in the world, including the United States.

It was this military capability of the Soviets, rather than merely the launching of the first artificial satellite, that alarmed American military and political leadership most — though the symbolic value of Sputnik's launch was no less significant. The Soviet propaganda ploy of using the first satellite launch as proof of the superiority of the communist system over "decadent" capitalism stung the U.S. administration into taking emergency measures to match the perceived "missile gap" between the two powers. The so-called missile gap was more of a forecast than a statement about the current balance of power (Levine 58), but it carried enormous political weight nonetheless.

Frantic efforts were made to launch the first U.S. satellite. The initial attempt on December 6, 1957 failed disastrously when the Vanguard launch rocket exploded moments after liftoff, plunging the nation into further gloom. Success came with the launch of Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958. Meanwhile, President Eisenhower submitted a bill to Congress that was quickly passed and signed into law in late July, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA was entrusted with consolidating all of the nation's diverse space exploration programs with the objective of putting a man in orbit (Koman; "History of the Space Programme").

In the early stages of the space race, the Soviet Union held the edge. The Eisenhower administration, perhaps recognizing this fact, played down the idea of a head-to-head competition. Khrushchev, the Soviet premier at the time, while seeking détente with the West, gloated over his country's lead in space exploration and embarrassed the U.S. with a series of high-profile successes.

In 1958, both countries were trying to be the first to send a satellite to the moon. The Soviets again managed to launch the first object — Luna 1 — to leave Earth's orbit, on January 2, 1959. Further successes followed: on September 14, 1959, Luna 2 became the first artificial object to strike the Moon; in October 1959, Luna 3 flew around the Moon and radioed back the first pictures of the far side of the Moon, invisible from Earth. Earlier, on November 3, 1957, the Soviets had sent the first space traveler — a dog named Laika — aboard Sputnik 2, which survived for several days before Laika died of heat exhaustion. The initial U.S. attempts in 1959 to send satellites to the moon, the series of probes called Rangers, were largely unsuccessful.

As a result, space exploration and the state of the nation's nuclear defenses became a major issue in the U.S. presidential election of 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. Observing that the U.S. was losing the strategic space race, Kennedy asserted during the campaign: "We cannot run second in this vital race. To ensure peace and freedom, we must be first" (quoted in Ezell and Ezell).

After his election, President Kennedy set about revitalizing the country's space program. Just ten days after his inauguration, he appointed James E. Webb as the head of NASA and directed him to prepare a plan for eliminating the Soviet lead in space exploration. While the administration was still deliberating on the program's direction, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth on April 12, 1961. It was another propaganda coup for the Soviets, exploited to the full as proof that communism was the superior system for galvanizing human productivity, and yet another blow to the American image at home and abroad. It further convinced Kennedy of the need to take the lead in the space race.

On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy declared in a special address to Congress: "…this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth." Congress approved the proposal and appropriated funds for NASA to prepare for a manned lunar landing (Chaikan). The nation was now committed to beating the Soviets in the race to the moon.

In order to implement Kennedy's vision, NASA devised a plan consisting of three phases: Project Mercury, with six missions into outer space; Project Gemini, an intermediate program; and Apollo, the largest and most ambitious of the three, which would culminate in the manned moon landings. From this point onward, the U.S. began to close the gap with the Soviet space program and ultimately overtook it as Soviet efforts were hampered by a lack of funding for an enormously expensive endeavor.

There can be little doubt that the massive space program launched by NASA to put a man on the moon "before the end of the decade" in the early sixties was the result of a Cold War maneuver by the U.S. that would probably not have happened if not for the competition with Communist Russia. After the Bay of Pigs debacle — the failed attempt by CIA-backed Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro — and in the wake of the series of Soviet successes in space, Kennedy felt obliged to redeem himself and to restore a sense of achievement among Americans. The NASA moon project was thus accorded the highest priority by the U.S. government not just for its scientific worth, but also for its strategic defense importance and as a "feel good" propaganda exercise (Levine 82).