Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Space Race

The Cold War had accumulated from many rivalries that the US and the USSR shared. They were interlocked which seemed like a ever-lasting war that did not include much violence. The peak of the rivalry, however, had reached that point during the "Space Race". There were many other instances that could be argued as being the "peak", such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bay of Pigs Invasion, or the destruction of the Berlin Wall. The Space Race was the conflict for space supremacy between the US and the USSR. It started in 1955 when the US announced that they would be sending artificial intelligence into space and the USSR responded by saying that they would also send something similar into space, most likely a satellite. They beat the US in sending a satellite into space first in 1957 and the first human into space in 1961 with the Sputnik 1 carrying Yuri Gagarin. However, the US responded by sending three astronauts (Armstrong and Aldrin) on the spaceship Apollo 11. It came to an end with the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project in which both the US and USSR agreed to cooperate together on the project. The Space Race left an everlasting legacy for Earth communications and even allowed for the International Space Station (ISS) to be developed. It also allowed for numerous changes int technologies and will be considered one of the most beneficial rivalries to comer out of the Cold War.