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Why America Backed the Apollo Missions

9 Pages 2325 Words September 2019

At the end of World War II in the 1940s, another clash started. It was referred to as the Cold War; this fight set two of the world's greatest superpowers at that time, the communist Union of socialist soviet republics (USSR) and the capitalist and democratic United States (US) against one another. Starting just before the 1960s, space would get to be an alternative field where this rivalry would play out, as every side looked to demonstrate the high quality of its inventions and innovations, its war capabilities and also the functionality and effectiveness of both its political systems and financial structures (The Space Race). Space travel and exploration was the alternative field for Cold War rivalry. It was the Russians who drew the first blood when they dispatched Sputnik (Russian meaning "explorer") this was the world's first man-made satellite to be put into the Earth's orbit, on the 4th of October 1957, via the Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic rocket. The launch of this satellite was unexpected and unpalatable to the Americans. What's more, this showing of the staggering force of the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile which was apparently fit enough for dispatching an atomic warhead onto U.S. soil made intelligence gathering activities on the Soviet Armed Forces exercises, especially dire. The USSR made even further strides forward in the year 1959 when they dispatched Luna 2, the first spacecraft to hit the moon (The Space Race).
Additional success was achieved by the soviets in April 1961, as their cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first individual to circle or orbit the Earth, voyaging in Vostok 1, a capsule-shaped space vehicle. For the U.S. the push to send a man into space, was named Project Mercury, NASA engineering designers came up with a spacecraft molded after a cone and less heavy than Vostok; they tried it with chimpanzees, and held its last experimental run/test flight in March 1961 preceding the Sovietā...

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