Between 1957 and 1975, the Cold War rivalry between
the United States and Soviet Union had a secondary ‘front’ focused on attaining
firsts in space exploration, which were seen as necessary for national security
and symbolic of technological and ideological superiority.
It effectively began with the
Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1
artificial satellite on 4 October 1957, and concluded with the
co-operative Apollo-Soyuz
Test Project human spaceflight mission in July 1975.
Sputnik 1 (Russian:
"Cпутник-1") was the first artificial
Earth satellite, launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4
October 1957, from Site No.1/5,
at the 5th Tyuratam
range, in Kazakh SSR
(now at the Baikonur
Cosmodrome).
The satellite travelled at about
29,000 kilometers (18,000 mi) per hour, taking 96.2 minutes to complete
each orbit. The signals continued for 22 days until the transmitter batteries
ran out on 26 October 1957. Sputnik 1 burned up on 4 January 1958, as it fell
from orbit, after travelling about 60 million km (37 million miles) and
spending 3 months in orbit.
Photo Legacy: Making your memories last forever www.photolegacy.com
Image courtesy of San Diego Air
& Space Museum Archives under The Commons Agreement on Flickr
Research courtesy of Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_race
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