What Was the Space Race? A Missile Programme With a Public Face

Both programmes began with German wartime work. The V-2, developed at Peenemunde under Wernher von Braun, was the first object to reach space on a suborbital trajectory and was built by prisoners under conditions that killed more people in its manufacture than it killed as a weapon. At the end of the war both sides seized hardware, documents and personnel, with the United States recruiting von Braun and his team under Operation Paperclip and the Soviet Union taking facilities and engineers of its own while relying more heavily on its own designers, principally Sergei Korolev, who had survived imprisonment in the purges and whose identity was kept secret throughout his life, referred to publicly only as the chief designer. The Soviet lead in the early years had a specific technical cause: Soviet nuclear warheads were heavier, so their missiles had to be more powerful, which meant that when the moment came to put something in orbit they had a launcher capable of lifting far more than the American equivalent.

The Soviet Union took almost every early milestone, and each was announced in a way calculated for maximum effect:

• •Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in October 1957, a polished sphere transmitting a beeping signal any amateur could receive, which caused something close to panic in the United States
• •Laika, the first animal in orbit, weeks later, on a mission with no provision for return
• •Luna 2 reaching the moon's surface in 1959 and Luna 3 photographing its far side
• •Yuri Gagarin, the first human in orbit, in April 1961
• •Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, in 1963, after which no woman flew for nineteen years
• •Alexei Leonov performing the first spacewalk in 1965, during which his suit inflated so much he could not re-enter the airlock until he vented air from it, a detail not disclosed at the time
• •The American response included the creation of a civilian space agency in 1958, a large increase in science education funding, and Kennedy's 1961 commitment to a crewed lunar landing before the decade ended, chosen precisely because it was far enough ahead that the existing Soviet lead would not decide it

The Apollo programme consumed an extraordinary share of national resources, peaking at over four percent of the federal budget, and employed around four hundred thousand people across industry and government. The decisive technical decision was the mission mode: rather than landing an entire spacecraft, the programme adopted lunar orbit rendezvous, in which a small dedicated lander separates in lunar orbit, descends, returns and rejoins the main craft, which saves enormous mass and was advocated persistently by the engineer John Houbolt against considerable institutional resistance. The cost of the programme included the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, which killed three astronauts on the launch pad in a pure oxygen cabin and forced a comprehensive redesign. Apollo 11 landed in July 1969, and five further landings followed before the programme was cancelled with hardware already built, because the political objective had been achieved and public interest had moved on. The Soviet lunar programme failed largely because its enormous N1 rocket never flew successfully, with four launch failures, and because Korolev died in 1966 during routine surgery, removing the one person able to hold the competing design bureaux together.

The strategic framing explains what happened next. Once the contest was settled the funding fell sharply, and the subsequent decades were dominated by reusable vehicles, space stations and cooperation, with the Apollo-Soyuz docking in 1975 as a deliberate symbol and the International Space Station as the durable institutional result. The technological legacy is frequently overstated in popular accounts, since several inventions commonly attributed to the programme predate it, and is real in specific areas: integrated circuits found their first large-scale demanding customer in the Apollo guidance computer, which pushed the entire industry down the cost curve, and satellite communications, weather observation and earth remote sensing all developed directly from the launch capability. The photograph of the earth taken from lunar orbit on Apollo 8 in 1968 is frequently credited with giving the environmental movement its central image. The costs included lives, an enormous diversion of scientific talent into a single objective, and a pattern in which crewed spaceflight has since struggled to justify itself without a competitor.

Both space programmes grew directly from ballistic missile development and from captured German work, and the Soviet early lead came from needing more powerful rockets for heavier warheads. The Soviet Union took the first satellite, animal, man, woman and spacewalk, and the United States chose a lunar landing as a goal distant enough that the existing lead would not decide it. Apollo reached the moon using lunar orbit rendezvous, and funding collapsed once the contest ended.