The Space Race was a technological and ideological competition between the Soviet Union and the United States of America (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 between these nations that arose just after the end of the Second World War, in which both sides captured 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.

Late 1920s and early 1930s, German aerospace engineers started to experiment with liquid fuelled rockets with the goal that one day they would be capable of reaching high altitudes and traversing long distances. During this time, 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.

A young engineering, Wernher von Braun was recruited by Becker and Dornberger to join their secret army program at Kummersdorf-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 the Peenemünde army rocket centre, and von Braun was the technical director of the ballistic missile program and they are ones who  led 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), a ballistic missile with a 320-kilometer range carrying a 1,130-kilogram warhead at 4,000-kilometer-per-hour.

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

As the war came to an end, American, British, and Soviet scientific intelligence teams competed to capture the German rockets, designs, and engineers.

Each of the Allies captured a share of the available members of the German rocket team, but the US benefited the most with Operation Paperclip, recruiting von Braun and many others, who later helped develop the American missile and space exploration programs.

The former World War II allies, the US and the USSR, became involved in the Cold War, a period of political conflict and military tension.

The US defense strategy included a large Air Force employing air-refuelable, strategic bombers and advance bases in Europe and Turkey, close to Soviet airspace. Since the USSR had neither an equivalent air force, nor advance bases near the continental US, Stalin ordered the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) in 1947, to counter the American threat.

Stalin’s intercontinental ballistic missile.

The Soviet rocket engineers were led by Sergey Korolyov who 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, it’s said his name was only revealed when he died in 1966.

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