Believe it or not, the space race really happened. The two great nations of the day poured all the resources of a 20th century super power into dominating space. We sometimes look back on the competition between the USA and the USSSR to reach the moon and beyond as a noble effort to explore the cosmos, but the space race was very much an extentsion of hegemony and the military industrial complex. It also produced some of the most astonishing achievement in engineering the human species has ever known. here’s more form the National Air and Space Museum:
During the initial years of the Cold War space race, the Soviets were outright winning. They completed a series of launches into orbit: Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, and Valentina Tereshkova, who in July 1963 became the first woman in space. These early accomplishments, however, never led the Soviets anywhere close to putting a human on the moon. Cathleen S. Lewis, a curator in the space history department at the National Air and Space Museum, has written Cosmonaut: A Cultural History, which documents the complicated past of Soviet and Russian human space exploration. Examining the social and political underpinnings of spaceflight, Lewis focuses on the achievements of cosmonauts and how their images have often been used for propaganda. She was recently interviewed by Air & Space Quarterly senior editor Diane Tedeschi.
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