The Space Race

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The Space Race was a competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for supremacy in space. From 1955 until 1975, both sides battled it out to be the leader in the competition. Fueled by the Cold War and other causes of the beginning of the race, the Soviet Union and the United States fought for authority in a very public manner through the media. There were many achievements at this time and it led the way for many great things to come afterwards.
The origins of the Space Race can be found in Germany in the 1930s. During World War II, Nazi Germany was researching and building operational ballistic missiles and experimenting with liquid-fueled rockets. As early as 1942 and 1943, the rocket Aggregate-4 became the first vehicle to reach outer space and Germany began mass producing it as a ballistic missile. They called it Vergeltungswaff 2 which translates to Vengeance Weapon 2. It travelled at four thousand kilometers per hour and, because radar detection provided little warning, there was no defense against it. After the war, the Soviet Union and the United States used the V-2 as the basis of their rocket designs. As World War II was ending, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union all competed for Germany’s engineers and rockets. While all three Allies gained from this, the United States gained the most with Operation Paperclip. During this operation, the United States recruited Werner von Braun, the technical director of Nazi Germany’s missile program, as the lead rocket engineer as well as a large number of the V-2 rockets. The Soviets secured Sergei Korolev, a member of space clubs and early Soviet rocket design in the 1930s before he was arrested and imprisoned for six years, as their chief rocket and s...

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