Even worse than that. When the Eisenhower administration got wind of von Braun and the Army’s plans to launch a satellite with a Redstone, they were explicitly forbidden to do so in favor of the Navy’s (late) Vanguard project. After Sputnik they got the green light, and launched Explorer 1 very soon afterward, still ahead of Vanguard. We didn’t lose the race to orbit, we got tripped by our own team.
Do you have any more information on that? Its the first I’ve heard of it.
Lots of national chest-beating in this thread, as a member of the Neutral Yorropean camp (who’s nation proudly gave £10 million towards the European Space Agency last year…yes thats m and yet we spend £1 Billion on a useless dome and a new football stadium) with the benefit of hindsight can we not look back and recognise the extremely impressive achievements of both sides?
Both the US and the USSR pushed the boundaries and achieved remarkable feats.
I think the fairest comment in this thread was by the person who stated “The USSR won the race to space, and the USA run the race to the moon”
For the space effort as a whole though I’d say the fairest assessment was that it was a draw.
However the Space Race is commonly considered the race to the moon, which the US did indeed win, however it was an extremely close run thing as the Soviets rushed to catch up with the N1 rocket, however the corner cutting resulted in several failures and they fell irrevocably behind.
BTW The Soviet Space Shuttle’s first flight was entirely unmanned and the Energia booster is still the most powerful launch complex ever field, and of course as it appeared roughly a decade after the US space shuttle thats by no means a knock.
An interesting sidenote, at the start of both nations space efforts Kennedy offered Kruschev the option of combining their space programs and working together, I can’t remember exactly what happened but either Kruschev ignored the offer or something intervened, perhaps the Powers U2 shootdown.
(I just wish humanity could combine their efforts and make a real push for space together…but thats just me, foolishly idealistic as always)
£10 million… shakes head
I don’t know anything about this, but I remember a writer on C-SPAN who studied Ike’s recently (in the last few years) de-classified papers. He said that Eisenhower wouldn’t let Von Braun go into to orbit because he was worried that the Soviets would freak out, claim that the US military satellite was violating their airspace and try to establish international agreements limiting the military and surveillance uses of space.
Eisenhower knew the US could use space for spying better than the Soviets, so he wanted a US civilian organization or the Soviets to go into orbit first.
Supposedly, Ike even sent his own people down to inspect Von Braun’s rockets before testing to make sure that the crazy German wouldn’t put something into space without permission.
I heard that a Russian cosmonaut couple were the first to achieve conception of a baby in space! is this true?
Seems to be an important milestone in space exploration! 
Looks at clock.
3:14pm
screams
Crap.
Perhaps he broke a model of the joint effort capsule with his shoe.
