The Space Race

The Space Race (1957–1975) was a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for spaceflight supremacy during the Cold War. The USSR launched Sputnik (1957, first satellite), sent Yuri Gagarin to orbit (1961, first human in space), and achieved the first spacewalk (1965). The US responded with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, culminating in Apollo 11's Moon landing on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon. The Space Race drove massive advances in rocketry, materials science, computing, and telecommunications, and symbolically ended with the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission in 1975.