The First Space Race; Launching the World's First Satellites

College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. First Paperback Edition. Presumed first printing. Trade paperback. Very good/No dust jacket issued. xviii, 214 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Suggested Reading. Index. Foreword by James A. Van Allen. Matt Bille is an author in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is also a naturalist, historian, science writer, and defense consultant. A former Air Force officer, he is the author of over 20 technical publications and articles on space-related topics. He is the lead author of the NASA-published history The First Space Race: Launching the World's First Satellites (2004), a groundbreaking account of the early Space Age. He wrote two books on the world's rarest and least-known animals, Rumors of Existence (1995) and Shadows of Existence (2004), and is working on his third, tentatively titled Seas, Sharks, and Serpents. He has been a freelance contributor to reference books including Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia and the Nature Yearbook of Science & Technology. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and is a member of the History Committee of the American Astronautical Society. The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US), for supremacy in spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations that occurred following World War II, enabled by captured German rocket technology and personnel. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and symbolic of ideological superiority. The Space Race spawned pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, unmanned space probes of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon. The competition began 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 Soviet Union beat the US to this, with the October 4, 1957 orbiting of Sputnik 1, and later beat the US to the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. The race peaked with the July 20, 1969 US landing of the first humans on the Moon with Apollo 11. The USSR tried but failed manned lunar missions, and eventually canceled them and concentrated on Earth orbital space stations.
A period of detente followed with the April 1972 agreement on a cooperative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew. The end of the Space Race is harder to pinpoint than its beginning, but it was over by the December, 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, after which true spaceflight cooperation between the US and Russia began. The Space Race has left a legacy of Earth communications and weather satellites, and continuing human space presence on the International Space Station. It has also sparked increases in spending on education and research and development, which led to beneficial spin-off technologies.