The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, 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 and had its peak with the more particular Moon Race to land on the Moon between the US moonshot and Soviet moonshot programs. 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.
Wernher von Braun's space station concept (1952)
Wernher von Braun became the United States' lead rocket engineer during the 1950s and 1960s.
The US stable of Explorer 1, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch vehicles were a varied group of ICBMs and the NASA-developed Saturn IB rocket.
Replica of the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1, 1957
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, that started in 1947, two years after the end of World War II and lasted to 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union.
Allied troops in Vladivostok, August 1918, during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
American Relief Administration operations in Russia, 1922
Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev celebrating the second anniversary of the October Revolution
The Battle of Stalingrad, considered by many historians as a decisive turning point of World War II