More than a billion people viewed the historic landing, and the moment overwhelmed Americans with the feeling of dominance. The moon landing united the country with a sense of insurmountable pride. The United States had won the Space Race, a competition more significant than any earthly battle.
Most historians agree that the space race ended on 20 July 1969 when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon for the first time. As the climax of space history and exploration, the lunar landing led to a triumph for the US.
Though there were additional American and Soviet missions, after the successes of the Apollo program, the space race was widely believed to have been won by the U.S.. Eventually, as the Cold War came to an end, both sides agreed to cooperate in space and construct the International Space Station, beginning in 1998.
For example, in 1966 Mishin noted several deficiencies in the Soviet space program, including problems with the supply of hardware components, absence of a national space agency, low priority of the manned lunar program, and lack of a long-term master plan for space exploration.
Who Won the Space Race? By landing on the moon, the United States effectively “won” the space race that had begun with Sputnik's launch in 1957. For their part, the Soviets made four failed attempts to launch a lunar landing craft between 1969 and 1972, including a spectacular launch-pad explosion in July 1969.
But Sputnik itself isn't in orbit around Earth any longer. In fact, it was so short-lived that by time the United States successfully launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite in space, Sputnik 2, carrying the first animal in space, had already been orbiting Earth for months.
The space race formally ended on July 17, 1975, when the U.S. and Soviet Union linked up in orbit and shook hands during the Apollo-Soyuz mission. Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts shake hands in orbit as the two nations' spacecraft dock during the Apollo-Soyuz mission, as seen in this artist's illustration.
The competition gained Western public attention with the "Sputnik crisis", when the USSR achieved the first successful satellite launch, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957. It gained momentum when the USSR sent the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space with the orbital flight of Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961.
The very first nation to reach the surface of the moon was the USSR (Russia), whose unmanned spacecraft Luna 2 impacted the moon' surface on 12 September 1959. While Luna 2 was the first probe to land on the moon, it had been designed to crash-land into the surface (a "hard landing") rather than conduct a soft landing.
Russia has announced it is pulling out of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024 to focus on building its own low Earth orbit outpost. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, is one of five international space agencies that have had principal involvement with the ISS since its earliest development in 1993.
All along, the Soviet moon program had suffered from a third problem—lack of money. Massive investments required to develop new ICBMs and nuclear weapons so that the Soviet military could achieve strategic parity with the United States siphoned funds away from the space program.
The USSR rocketed to the lead in the Cold War's "Space Race" with the launch of Sputnik, a basketball-sized satellite that became the first manmade object to orbit the Earth. On October 4, 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth.
Images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have shown that the American flags left on the Moon by Apollo astronauts are still standing– except for the Apollo 11 mission, which Buzz Aldrin reported as being knocked over by engine exhaust as Apollo 11 lifted off.
To date, only one country has succeeded in landing humans on the moon: the United States of America. As part of the Apollo space program, the United States has landed a total of 12 astronauts.
The United States is the only country to have successfully conducted crewed missions to the Moon, with the last departing the lunar surface in December 1972.
Richard Cavendish explains how, on September 12th, 1959, the Soviet Union launched Luna 2, the first spacecraft to successfully reach the Moon.
The 1960s were an active decade in space exploration, dominated entirely by the space race between the U.S. and the USSR. During this decade, the Soviets spent more than 30 billion U.S. dollars on their space missions, 1969 being the year with the highest space expenditure at 5.5 billion U.S. dollars.
On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to travel into space.
Then, on October 4, 1957, came the announcement that shocked America. The Soviets had launched a missile with a thrust over six times greater than any U.S. missile and sent a satellite into orbit around the world — The Sputnik I.
More than a billion people viewed the historic landing, and the moment overwhelmed Americans with the feeling of dominance. The moon landing united the country with a sense of insurmountable pride. The United States had won the Space Race, a competition more significant than any earthly battle.
"Timeline of the Space Race, 1957–69".
Sputnik 1 burned up on 4 January 1958 while reentering Earth's atmosphere, after three months, 1,440 completed orbits of the Earth, and a distance traveled of about 70,000,000 km (43,000,000 mi).
"Sputnik burned up in the atmosphere. A month after the launch of that satellite, a second was sent up containing the dog, Laika. It orbited for five hours and died from overheating. That satellite also burned up.
The Vanguard spacecraft, the oldest satellite still in orbit, is seen here in Cape Canaveral, Florida, back in 1958. Today, there are more than 2,600 active satellites in orbit, as well as thousands of dead satellites that circle the planet as space junk.
Some of it is waste from the trip that the astronauts dumped when they got to their destination. Aside from trash—from food packaging to wet wipes—nearly 100 packets of human urine and excrement have been discarded. The Apollo astronauts also dumped tools and television equipment that they no longer needed.