The spirit of détente was extended to space during the Nixon and Ford years when an Apollo capsule docked with a Soviet Soyuz vehicle in 1975. Throughout the remainder of the Cold War, space never quite recaptured the attention it garnered during its moon phase. And when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon in July 1969, it was the only first that mattered. Four days later, the Soviet Union responded by declaring they would also launch a satellite 'in the near future'. By: Sivani Reddy a competition of space exploration The Space Race 1957 to 1975 Causes One Cause of the Space Race was the Cold War between the United. In 1962 he called for NASA to achieve victory by decade’s end. Perhaps because the space race was so inseparable from the Cold War, during the 1960s the US government invested vast resources to the quest to reach the moon. The competition began on Jwhen the United States announced its intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year. Though also uneasy with the price tag, Kennedy understood that the Soviets might be ahead but the finish line was the moon itself whoever landed a man on the moon would win the race. It was left to John Kennedy to grasp the public value of the space race. He also pushed the military to develop satellite programs that could monitor nuclear testing, track weather, aid navigation, and photograph the earth. Still, he created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to oversee civilian space projects and manned missions to space. President Eisenhower was nervous that the arms race might spill into a space race, the cost of which, he feared, might ruin the economy. They sent aloft the first animal, and then in 1961, the first human, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.Īmerica moved more slowly. The Soviets moved more quickly and were the first to understand the political value of space “firsts.�? By October 1957 they had launched the first satellite, Sputnik.

When was the race into space cold war