The Legacy of 1969
When President John F. Kennedy greeted cheering students at Rice University in 1962, in Houston, his administration was in the midst of an important war that, if won, would project American power in the most eminent domain - outer space. A victory in the Space Race, the moniker of the American-Soviet competition to trump each other in pioneering new advancements in space, would grant America prestige on the world stage and kindle patriotism in even the most nihilistic.
Perhaps it is telling why he chose then to deliver this iconic line: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," the President said, promising to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Although the moon landing is the most popularized and sensationalized element of the Space Race, it was the culmination of many small steps of space development, and it rode the backs of hundreds of others of other achievements and failures alike. What were those achievements and failures? How have they shaped the legacy of our nation and the moon landing? And what has been done since to further human presence in space?
The Space Race was unique in that it was the first international competition to be built on science - not industry or arms. In 1955, the Space Race began when both superpowers announced their intention to launch artificial satellites into space. It was feared by both nations that these satellites would become important military assets for reconnaissance and deadlier capabilities. Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2, both Russian satellites, were launched in 1957 and Explorer 1, the American satellite, followed in 1958. In the Soviet Union, the use of the dog Laika as a passenger in Sputnik 2 both immortalized the dog in Soviet propaganda and signified the viability of sending living organisms into space.
This foray in sending animals to space continued, with the Russian Sputnik 5 returning two dogs and a range of plants alive from space in 1960, and the Americans sending Ham, a great chimpanzee, into space aboard the Mercury-Redstone 2 mission. But these feats were overshadowed by Yuri Gagarin’s two-hour orbit of Earth on the Vostok 1 - an accomplishment that won him great acclaim throughout the entire Warsaw Pact in 1961. Between then and 1969, Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk in 1965,
the Mariner 4 successfully voyaged to Mars and returned the first photographs of its surface, also in that year, and a few days before 1969, the Apollo 8 conducted an orbit of the Moon.
Public attention, however, was never as high as the summer of 1969, when the long-awaited Apollo 11 mission. Until this point, the Soviet Union appeared to be winning the Space Race, based on their victories with Vostok and Sputnik. One million spectators watched the launch of Apollo 11, televised to millions of people internationally. Three days after the launch, on July 19, 1969, Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit - and the rest is history. Armstrong’s quote “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” after he stepped onto the lunar surface has been credited as one of the defining moments of the Space Race, and indeed, the wider Cold War.
With the lunar landing, America’s victory in the Space Race was cemented. However, because of the perceived triumph over the Soviet Union, Americans gradually lost interest in the Space Race in favor of more pressing issues, like the war in Vietnam and the rising counterculture movement. This was reflected in NASA’s budget, which reached a peak of $5 billion in the mid-1960s and dropped to $3 billion in the early 1970s. Many have mourned the apparent “surrender” to space; however, contemporary space ventures have been pioneered mostly by private enterprise like SpaceX, and now, Martian - not lunar - missions are at the forefront of space exploration and development.
We at the Up and Above blog hope that renewed interest in space exploration becomes a reality for new generations of astronomers, physicists, chemists, and even biologists - in the spirit of 1969 and the Space Race.
