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During the Cold War, the USA and the Soviets announced that they planned to be launching stellites in orbit. The Soviets took the US announcement as a challenge and established the goal to beat the Americans in setting a satellite into space
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The Soviets took the lead into the Space Race by launching the first successful satellite into orbit named Sputnik I
( the USA launched theirs named Explorer I four months later) -
Laïka was the first dog to ever go into space aboard Sputnik II. She sadly died during mission and never came back to Earth. That made her the first animal to die in space too. -
The National Aeronautics Space Administration has been created by the USA to supervise the space activities during their rivality against the URSS. -
Once again, the URSS kept their advance to launch the first man, Youri Gagarine, into orbit during the Vostok 1 mission. The USA launched theirs only three weeks later. -
The USA were the first to ever fly over another planet, which was Venus. This has been realised by Mariner 2: the Venus probe! -
During this mission, the USA send the Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 projects to meet in space -
It's the first time, during the Apollo 8 mission, that the crew escaped the Earth orbit tu go to the Moon one. That's also the first time that a human saw the Earth rise. -
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first astronauts to ever walk on the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. This event has been live broadcast by the TV and watched by over 500 000 000 persons -
The US took a huge advantage thanks to the Apollo and Gemini programs. At the time, the realtions between the USA and the URSS began to thaw, so they worked on the first US-Soviet joint mission occured with the Apollo-Soyez project. This is officially the end of the Space Race.
