On July 29, 1957, in recognition of the 1957-1958 International Geophysical Year (an international scientific project that lasted from July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958) the White House announced that the U.S. intended to launch satellites by the spring of 1958.

This became known as Project Vanguard. On July 31, the Soviets announced that they intended to launch a satellite by the fall of 1957.

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, thus beginning the Space Race and making the USSR the first space power.

The Soviet government derived great propaganda value from the launch, to boost the morale of its own citizens, and claiming to the world proof of the superiority of Soviet communism over Western capitalism.

In the meantime, a public and embarrassing Project Vanguard launch failure had occurred at Cape Canaveral USA. But nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1, the United States successfully launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, with an alternate program on an accelerated schedule, becoming the second space power.

Explorer 1 flight data confirmed the existence of the radiation belt theorized by James Van Allen, considered one of the outstanding discoveries of the International Geophysical Year.

Sputnik’s success and Vanguard’s failure caused such political turmoil in the United States, that the period is known as the Sputnik crisis. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration quickly enacted several initiatives to address the perceived technical shortcomings in the United States.

Within a year, the United States Congress passed legislation creating NASA, as well as the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), the most far-reaching federally-sponsored education initiative in the nation’s history.

The NDEA authorized expenditures of more than $1 billion for a wide range of reforms including new school construction, fellowships and loans to encourage promising students to seek higher education, new efforts in vocational education to meet critical manpower shortages in the defense industry, and a host of other programs. In 1959, NASA initiated Project Mercury to put a man in space.

The actual beginning of the effort that resulted in manned space flight cannot be pinpointed, although, it is known that the thought has been in the mind of man throughout recorded history. It was only in the last century, however, that technology had developed to the point where man could actually transform his ideas into hardware to achieve space flight.

Specific studies and tests conducted by some Governments and industries indicated the feasibility of manned space flight. Implementation was initiated to establish a national manned space-flight project, later named Project Mercury, on October 7, 1958.

The United States’ first manned space flight project, was successfully accomplished in  four years and eight months period of dynamic activity which saw more than 2,000,000 people from many major government agencies and much of the aerospace industry combine their skills, initiative, and experience into a national effort.

In this period, six manned space flights were accomplished as part of a 25-flight program. These manned space flights were accomplished with complete pilot safety and without change to the basic Mercury concepts.

It was shown that man, can function ably as a pilot-engineer-experimenter without undesirable reactions or deteriorations of normal body functions for periods up to 34 hours of weightless flight. Directing this large and fast moving project, required the development of a management structure and operating mode that satisfied the requirement to mold the many different entities into a workable structure.

The former World War II allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, became involved in the Cold War. The Cold War was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition existing after World War II, primarily between the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, particularly the United States.

Although the primary participants’ military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, a nuclear arms race, and economic and technological competitions, such as the Space Race.

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