Collection of Random Writing

Essay 3 : Script for the Space Race

A note before reading:
I wrote this essay as the pandemic went on, planning to eventually make it into a series of videos about the Space Race, where I'd examine the social, economic and etc reactions of certain events. I never really finished it, this is just the more complete draft of the essay.
I do hope to someday finish it, but I have my doubts.

The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States of America (USA), to achieve superior spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations following World War II. The technological advantage demonstrated by spaceflight achievement was seen as necessary for national security, and became part of the symbolism and ideology of the time. The Space Race brought pioneering launches of artificial satellites, robotic space probes to the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and ultimately to the Moon.The competition began in earnest on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The developments in ballistic missile capabilities made it possible to take the competition between the two states into space. This competition gained public attention with the "Sputnik shock", when the USSR achieved the first successful artificial satellite launch on October 4, 1957 of Sputnik 1, and subsequently when the USSR sent the first human to space with the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. The USSR demonstrated an early lead in the race with these and other firsts over the next few years, reaching the Moon for the first time with the Luna programme by employing robotic missions.

After US president John F. Kennedy raised the stakes by setting a goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth". both countries worked on developing super heavy-lift launch vehicles, with the US successfully deploying the Saturn V, which was large enough to send a three-person orbiter and two-person lander to the Moon. Kennedy's Moon landing goal was achieved in July 1969, with the flight of Apollo 11, a singular achievement generally overshadowing any combination of Soviet achievements and often seen as the decisive achievement of the Space Race. The USSR pursued two crewed lunar programs, but did not succeed with their N1 rocket to launch and land on the Moon before the US, and eventually canceled it to concentrate on Salyut, the first space station programme, and the first time landings on Venus and on Mars. Meanwhile the US landed five more Apollo crews on the Moon and continued exploration of other extraterrestrial bodies robotically.

A period of détente followed with the April 1972 agreement on a co-operative Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew and joint development of an international docking standard APAS-75. Being considered as the final act of the Space Race, the competition would only gradually be replaced with cooperation. The collapse of the Soviet Union eventually allowed the US and the newly founded Russian Federation to end their Cold War competition also in space, by agreeing in 1993 on the Shuttle–Mir and International Space Station programs.

Origins

Fritz von Opel was instrumental in popularizing rockets as means of propulsion for vehicles. In the 1920s, he initiated together with Max Valier, co-founder of the "Verein für Raumschiffahrt", the world's first rocket program, Opel-RAK, leading to speed records for automobiles, rail vehicles and the first manned rocket-powered flight in September of 1929. Months earlier in 1928, one of his rocket-powered prototypes, the Opel RAK2, reached piloted by von Opel himself at the AVUS speedway in Berlin a record speed of 238 km/h, watched by 3000 spectators and world media. A world record for rail vehicles was reached with RAK3 and a top speed of 256 km/h. After these successes, von Opel piloted the world's first public rocket-powered flight using Opel RAK.1, a rocket plane designed by Julius Hatry. World media reported on these efforts, including UNIVERSAL Newsreel of the US, causing as "Raketen-Rummel" or "Rocket Rumble" immense global public excitement, and in particular in Germany, where inter alia Wernher von Braun was highly influenced. The Great Depression led to an end of the Opel-RAK program, but Max Valier continued the efforts. After switching from solid-fuel to liquid-fuel rockets, he died while testing and is considered the first fatality of the dawning space age.