224-545: The Space Race (Russian: Космическая гонка [kɐsˈmʲitɕɪskəjə ˈɡonkə] ) 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
448-615: A ballistic re-entry capsule launched on a derivative Atlas missile , and selecting a group of nine candidate pilots. After NASA's creation, the program was transferred over to the civilian agency's Space Task Group and renamed Project Mercury on November 26, 1958. The Mercury spacecraft was designed by the STG's chief engineer Maxime Faget . NASA selected a new group of astronaut (from the Greek for "star sailor") candidates from Navy , Air Force and Marine test pilots, and narrowed this down to
672-804: A German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948, the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in April 1949. The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the German Democratic Republic that October. Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state , completely reliant on and subservient to
896-465: A complex that was the world's largest spacecraft at that time, with a combined mass of 250 metric tons (250 long tons ; 280 short tons ). The Space Shuttle was a partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system that was operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program . Its official program name
1120-627: A cooperative Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew and joint development of an international docking standard APAS-75 . Being considered as the final act of the Space Race, the competition was only gradually replaced with cooperation. The collapse of the Soviet Union eventually allowed the US and
1344-606: A diplomatic channel for NASA to take part in the funding of the cripplingly under-funded Russian space program. This in turn allowed the newly fledged Russian government to keep Mir operating, in addition to the Russian space program as a whole, ensuring the Russian government remained friendly towards the United States. In addition to the flights of the Shuttle to Mir , Phase One also featured seven "Increments" aboard
1568-488: A few minutes later. This "fellow traveler", as the name is translated in English, was a small, beeping ball, less than two feet in diameter and weighing less than 200 pounds. But the celebrations were muted at the launch control center until the down-range far east tracking station at Kamchatka received the first distinctive beep ... beep ... beep sounds from Sputnik 1 ' s radio transmitters, indicating that it
1792-646: A general term, in his essay "You and the Atomic Bomb", published 19 October 1945 in the British newspaper Tribune . Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear warfare , Orwell looked at James Burnham 's predictions of a polarized world, writing: Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery... James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is,
2016-530: A group of seven for the program. Capsule design and astronaut training began immediately, working toward preliminary suborbital flights on the Redstone missile , followed by orbital flights on the Atlas. Each flight series would first start unpiloted, then carry a non-human primate, then finally humans. The Mercury spacecraft's principal designer was Maxime Faget , who started research for human spaceflight during
2240-469: A joint US/Soviet mission during the détente period of the Cold War and the docking between a US Apollo spacecraft and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. This was followed by the talks between NASA and Intercosmos in the 1970s about a "Shuttle– Salyut " program to fly Space Shuttle missions to a Salyut space station , with later talks in the 1980s even considering flights of the future Soviet shuttles from
2464-630: A large truss structure that spans 109 metres (358 ft), making it the largest spacecraft ever assembled. The completed station consists of five laboratories and is able to support six crew members. With over 332 cubic metres (11,700 cu ft) of habitable volume and a mass of 400,000 kilograms (880,000 lb) the completed station is almost twice the size of the combined Shuttle– Mir spacecraft. Phases Two and Three are intended to continue both international cooperation in space and zero-gravity scientific research, particularly regarding long-duration spaceflight. By spring 2015, Roscosmos , NASA, and
SECTION 10
#17327573242542688-522: A major propaganda effort began in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the communist system in the Eastern Bloc. Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press in the Soviet Bloc. Radio Free Europe was a product of some of
2912-619: A micrometeorite gauge and a Geiger-Müller tube . It passed in and out of the Earth-encompassing radiation belt with its 194-by-1,368-nautical-mile (360 by 2,534 km) orbit, therefore saturating the tube's capacity and proving what Dr. James Van Allen , a space scientist at the University of Iowa , had theorized. The belt, named the Van Allen radiation belt , is a doughnut-shaped zone of high-level radiation intensity around
3136-488: A moment that America would be successful". On January 31, 1958, nearly four months after the launch of Sputnik 1 , von Braun and the United States successfully launched its first satellite on a four-stage Juno I rocket derived from the US Army's Redstone missile, at Cape Canaveral. The satellite Explorer 1 was 30.66 pounds (13.91 kg) in mass. The payload of Explorer 1 weighed 18.35 pounds (8.32 kg). It carried
3360-695: A national hero of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and a worldwide celebrity. Moscow and other cities in the USSR held mass demonstrations, the scale of which was second only to the World War II Victory Parade of 1945 . April 12 was declared Cosmonautics Day in the USSR, and is celebrated today in Russia as one of the official "Commemorative Dates of Russia." In 2011, it was declared the International Day of Human Space Flight by
3584-483: A near collision with a Progress resupply cargo ship during a long-distance manual docking system test and a total loss of station electrical power. The power failure also caused a loss of attitude control , which led to an uncontrolled "tumble" through space. The next NASA astronaut to stay on Mir was Michael Foale . Foale and Russian mission specialist Elena Kondakova boarded Mir from Atlantis on mission STS-84 . The STS-84 crew transferred 249 items between
3808-642: A neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO, but his attempts were cut short after he was executed several months later during a Soviet power struggle. The events led to the establishment of the Bundeswehr , the West German military, in 1955. In 1949, CCP Chairman Mao Zedong 's People's Liberation Army defeated Chiang Kai-shek 's United States-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China. The KMT-controlled territory
4032-584: A new space station, which eventually became the International Space Station. They also agreed, in preparation for this new project, that the United States would be heavily involved in the Mir project in the years ahead, under the code name "Phase One" (the construction of the ISS being "Phase Two"). The first Space Shuttle flight to Mir was a rendezvous mission without docking on STS-63 . This
4256-675: A new war". On 6 September 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. As Byrnes stated a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people ... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds ..." In December,
4480-586: A plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already taken by the Soviets. In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine , the United States enacted the Marshall Plan , a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate, including the Soviet Union. Under the plan, which President Harry S. Truman signed on 3 April 1948,
4704-674: A second satellite was sent into orbit with augmented cosmic ray instruments. On April 2, 1958, President Eisenhower reacted to the Soviet space lead in launching the first satellite by recommending to the US Congress that a civilian agency be established to direct nonmilitary space activities. Congress, led by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson , responded by passing the National Aeronautics and Space Act , which Eisenhower signed into law on July 29, 1958. This law turned
SECTION 20
#17327573242544928-629: A secret 1950 document, the National Security Council proposed reinforcing pro-Western alliance systems and quadrupling spending on defense. Truman, under the influence of advisor Paul Nitze , saw containment as implying complete rollback of Soviet influence in all its forms. United States officials moved to expand this version of containment into Asia , Africa , and Latin America , in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by communist parties financed by
5152-443: A single, 108-minute orbit around the Earth in a craft called Vostok 1 . They dubbed Gagarin the first cosmonaut , roughly translated from Russian and Greek as "sailor of the universe". Gagarin's capsule was flown in automatic mode, since doctors did not know what would happen to a human in the weightlessness of space; but Gagarin was given an envelope containing the code that would unlock manual control in an emergency. Gagarin became
5376-480: A source of intelligence. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the KGB perfected its use of espionage to sway and distort diplomacy. Active measures were "clandestine operations designed to further Soviet foreign policy goals," consisting of disinformation, forgeries, leaks to foreign media, and the channeling of aid to militant groups. Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin , former head of Foreign Counter Intelligence for
5600-594: A spacecraft he named Freedom 7 . Though he did not achieve orbit like Gagarin, he was the first person to exercise manual control over his spacecraft's attitude and retro-rocket firing. After his successful return, Shepard was celebrated as a national hero, honored with parades in Washington, New York and Los Angeles, and received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal from President John F. Kennedy . Cold War The Cold War
5824-465: A string of other firsts achieved by the Soviets over the next few years. Gagarin's flight led US president John F. Kennedy to raise the stakes on May 25, 1961, by asking the US Congress to commit to the goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the end of the decade. Both countries began developing super heavy-lift launch vehicles , with the US successfully deploying
6048-699: A successor to the R-1, the R-2 with an extended frame and a new engine designed by Glushko, which entered service in November, 1951, with a range of 600 kilometres (370 mi), twice that of the R-1. This was followed in 1951 with the development of the R-5 Pobeda , the Soviet Union's first real strategic missile, with a range of 1,200 km (750 mi) and capable of carrying a 1 megaton (mt) thermonuclear warhead. The R-5 entered service in 1955. Scientific versions of
6272-532: A tabloid article about the " Mercury 13 " group of women wanting to become astronauts, and got the mistaken idea that NASA was actually entertaining this. Five months after her flight, Tereshkova married Vostok 3 cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev , and they had a daughter. The US Air Force had been developing a program to launch the first man in space, named Man in Space Soonest . This program studied several different types of one-man space vehicles, settling on
6496-504: A time. In 1979, the toppling of pro-US governments in Iran and Nicaragua and a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan again raised fears of war. In the 1980s, the US provided support for anti-communist forces in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the leadership of the USSR changed with the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev , who expanded political freedoms in his country and the Eastern Bloc. This led to
6720-542: A unified and neutral Germany was undesirable, with Walter Bedell Smith telling General Eisenhower "in spite of our announced position, we really do not want nor intend to accept German unification on any terms that the Russians might agree to, even though they seem to meet most of our requirements." Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade (June 1948 – May 1949), one of the first major crises of
6944-521: The Atlas missile , was tested in late 1958. ICBMs presented the ability to strike targets on the other side of the globe in a very short amount of time and in a manner which was impervious to air interception such as bombers might have been. The value which ICBMs presented in a nuclear standoff were very substantial, and this fact greatly accelerated efforts to develop rocket and rocket interception technology. The first Soviet development of artillery rockets
Space Race - Misplaced Pages Continue
7168-513: The Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic ". A week later, on 13 March, Stalin responded vigorously to the speech, saying Churchill could be compared to Adolf Hitler insofar as he advocated the racial superiority of English-speaking nations so that they could satisfy their hunger for world domination, and that such a declaration was "a call for war on the USSR." The Soviet leader also dismissed
7392-859: The Berlin Wall to prevent the citizens of East Berlin from fleeing to West Berlin , at the time part of United States-allied West Germany . Major crises of this phase included the Berlin Blockade of 1948–1949, the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1945–1949, the Korean War of 1950–1953, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Suez Crisis of that same year, the Berlin Crisis of 1961 ,
7616-796: The Buran programme to a future US space station – this "Shuttle– Salyut " program never materialized however during the existence of the Soviet Intercosmos program. This changed after the Dissolution of the Soviet Union : the end of Cold War and Space Race resulted in funding for the US modular space station (originally named Freedom ), which was planned since the early 1980s, being slashed. Similar budgetary difficulties were being faced by other nations with space station projects, prompting American government officials to start negotiations with partners in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Canada in
7840-561: The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) have agreed to extend the ISS's mission from 2020 to 2024. In 2018 that was then extended out to 2030. The results of this research will provide considerable information for long-duration expeditions to the Moon and flights to Mars . Following the intentional deorbiting of Mir on 23 March 2001, the ISS became the only space station in orbit around Earth. It retained that distinction until
8064-758: The Cuban Missile Crisis began after deployments of U.S. missiles in Europe and Soviet missiles in Cuba; it is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into full-scale nuclear war . Another major proxy conflict was the Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975; the Soviets solidified their domination of Eastern Europe with operations such as the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Both powers used economic aid in an attempt to win
8288-719: The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the Vietnam War of 1964–1975. Both superpowers competed for influence in Latin America and the Middle East , and the decolonising states of Africa , Asia , and Oceania . Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, this phase of the Cold War saw the Sino-Soviet split . Between China and the Soviet Union's complicated relations within the Communist sphere, leading to
8512-579: The Earth . They also assisted in the maintenance and repair of the aging station, following various incidents with fires, collisions, power losses, uncontrolled spins and toxic leaks. In all, the American astronauts would spend almost a thousand days aboard Mir , allowing NASA to learn a great deal about long-duration spaceflight, particularly in the areas of astronaut psychology and how best to arrange experiment schedules for crews aboard space stations. Mir
8736-847: The Eastern Bloc . Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito–Stalin split obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained communist but adopted a non-aligned position and began accepting financial aid from the US. Besides Berlin, the status of the city of Trieste was at issue. Until the break between Tito and Stalin, the Western powers and the Eastern bloc faced each other uncompromisingly. In addition to capitalism and communism, Italians and Slovenes, monarchists and republicans as well as war winners and losers often faced each other irreconcilably. The neutral buffer state Free Territory of Trieste , founded in 1947 with
8960-687: The International Space Station . Lucid became the first American woman to live on station, and, following a six-week extension to her Increment due to issues with Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters , her 188-day mission set the US single spaceflight record. During Lucid's time aboard Mir , the Priroda module, with about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) of US science hardware, was docked to Mir . Lucid made use of both Priroda and Spektr to carry out 28 different science experiments and as living quarters. Her stay aboard Mir ended with
9184-511: The KGB and involved in its intelligence operations, adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of the consensus policy came from anti-Vietnam War activists , the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament , and the anti-nuclear movement . In early 1947, France, Britain and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for
Space Race - Misplaced Pages Continue
9408-895: The Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The Shuttle fleet's total mission time was 1322 days, 19 hours, 21 minutes and 23 seconds. The Space Shuttle carried large payloads to various orbits, and, during the Shuttle– Mir and ISS programs, provided crew rotation and carried various supplies, modules and pieces of equipment to the stations. Each Shuttle was designed for a projected lifespan of 100 launches or 10 years' operational life. Nine docking missions were flown to Mir , from 1995 to 1997 during "Phase One": Space Shuttle Atlantis docked seven times to Mir , with Discovery and Endeavour each flying one docking mission to Mir . As Space Shuttle Columbia
9632-400: The Kingdom of Greece in its civil war against Communist-led insurgents. In the same month, Stalin conducted the rigged 1947 Polish legislative election which constituted an open breach of the Yalta Agreement . The US government responded to this announcement by adopting a policy of containment , with the goal of stopping the spread of communism . Truman delivered a speech calling for
9856-411: The National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C., with a paper titled "Satellite Over the Planet", on October 6, 1957. Korolev anticipated that von Braun might launch a Jupiter-C with a satellite payload on or around October 4 or 5, in conjunction with the paper. He hastened the launch, moving it to October 4. The launch vehicle for PS-1 was a modified R-7 – vehicle 8K71PS number M1-PS – without much of
10080-407: The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It also created a Civilian-Military Liaison Committee, appointed by the President, responsible for coordinating the nation's civilian and military space programs. On October 21, 1959, Eisenhower approved the transfer of the Army's remaining space-related activities to NASA. On July 1, 1960,
10304-439: The RS-82 and RS-132 missiles , which became the basis for the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher , During the 1930s Soviet rocket technology was comparable to Germany's, but Joseph Stalin 's Great Purge from 1936 to 1938 severely damaged its progress. In 1945 the Soviets captured several key Nazi German A-4 ( V-2 ) rocket production facilities, and also gained the services of some German scientists and engineers related to
10528-480: The Saturn V , which was large enough to send a three-person orbiter and two-person lander to the Moon. Kennedy's Moon landing goal was achieved in July 1969, with the flight of Apollo 11 . The conclusion of Apollo 11 is regarded by most as ending the Space Race with an American victory. This view is contested by some historians, whilst space historian Asif A. Siddiqi proposed a more balanced view. The USSR continued to pursue crewed lunar programs to launch and land on
10752-447: The Sino-Soviet border conflict , while France, a Western Bloc state, began to demand greater autonomy of action. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred to suppress the Prague Spring of 1968, while the United States experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War . In the 1960s–1970s, an international peace movement took root among citizens around
10976-491: The Soviet boycott of the Allied Control Council and its incapacitation, an event marking the beginning of the full-blown Cold War and the end of its prelude, as well as ending any hopes at the time for a single German government and leading to formation in 1949 of the Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic . The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, Greece, and Turkey. With
11200-446: The Space Race . The US and USSR were both part of the Allies of World War II , the military coalition which had defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. After the war, the USSR installed satellite governments in the territories of Eastern and Central Europe it had occupied, and promoted the spread of communism to North Korea in 1948 and created an alliance with the People's Republic of China in 1949. The US declared
11424-443: The Truman Doctrine of " containment " in 1947, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 to assist Western Europe's economic recovery, and founded the NATO military alliance in 1949 (which was matched by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact in 1955). Germany's split occupation zones solidified into East and West Germany in 1949. The first major proxy war of the period was the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, which ended in stalemate. In 1962,
SECTION 50
#173275732425411648-438: The Turkish Straits crisis and Black Sea border disputes were also a major factor in increasing tensions. In September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov ; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in
11872-454: The United Nations . The USSR demonstrated 24-hour launch pad turnaround and launched two piloted spacecraft, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 , in essentially identical orbits, on August 11 and 12, 1962. The two spacecraft came within approximately 6.5 kilometers (3.5 nautical miles) of one another, close enough for radio communication, but then drifted as far apart as 2,850 kilometers (1,540 nautical miles). The Vostok had no maneuvering rockets to keep
12096-415: The United Nations Security Council Resolution 82 and 83 backed the defense of South Korea, although the Soviets were then boycotting meetings in protest of the fact that Taiwan (Republic of China), not the People's Republic of China , held a permanent seat on the council. A UN force of sixteen countries faced North Korea, although 40 percent of troops were South Korean, and about 50 percent were from
12320-403: The Vergeltungswaffe 2 (V-2) developed by Nazi Germany to bomb the Allies in the war. After the war, both the US and USSR acquired custody of German rocket development assets which they used to leverage the development of their own missiles. Public interest in space flight was first aroused in October 1951 when the Soviet rocketry engineer Mikhail Tikhonravov published "Flight to the Moon" in
12544-399: The 1957–58 International Geophysical Year launches to establish this principle in international law. Eisenhower also feared that he might cause an international incident and be called a "warmonger" if he were to use military missiles as launchers. Therefore, he selected the untried Naval Research Laboratory 's Vanguard rocket , which was a research-only rocket. This meant that von Braun's team
12768-403: The 1960s. They cloaked the program in a shroud of secrecy; public pronouncements were uniformly positive. As far as the public knew, the Soviet space program had never experienced failure. According to historian James Andrews, "With almost no exceptions, coverage of Soviet space exploits, especially in the case of human space missions, omitted reports of failure or trouble". Dominic Phelan says in
12992-428: The Air Force PGM-11 Redstone rocket family at Cape Canaveral. By 1957, a descendant of the Air Force MX-774 received top-priority funding. and evolved into the Atlas-A , the first successful American ICBM. The Atlas made use of a thin stainless steel fuel tank which relied on the internal pressure of the tank for structural integrity, this allowed an overall lighter weight design. WD-40 was developed to prevent rust on
13216-441: The Army's first operational medium-range ballistic missile, the Redstone rocket , derivatives of which launched both America's first satellite, and the first piloted Mercury space missions. It became the basis for both the Jupiter and Saturn family of rockets . Each of the United States armed services had its own ICBM development program. The Air Force began ICBM research in 1945 with the MX-774 . In 1950, von Braun began testing
13440-440: The Atlas rockets so that rust protecting paint could be avoided, in order to further reduce weight. A later variant of the Atlas, the Atlas-D , served as a nuclear ICBM and as the orbital launch vehicle for Project Mercury and the remote-controlled Agena Target Vehicle used in Project Gemini . In 1955, with both the United States and the Soviet Union building ballistic missiles that could be used to launch objects into space,
13664-414: The Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas. The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world. The CIA also covertly sponsored a domestic propaganda campaign called Crusade for Freedom . The rearmament of West Germany was achieved in the early 1950s. Its main promoter was Konrad Adenauer ,
SECTION 60
#173275732425413888-404: The Cold War, preventing Western food, materials and supplies from arriving in the West Germany's exclave of West Berlin . The United States (primarily), Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with food and other provisions despite Soviet threats. The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against
14112-408: The Communist governments militarily. The fall of the Iron Curtain after the Pan-European Picnic and the Revolutions of 1989 , which represented a peaceful revolutionary wave with the exception of the Romanian revolution and the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992) , overthrew almost all of the Marxist–Leninist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself lost control in
14336-484: The Council of Ministers to build a Prosteishy Sputnik (PS-1), or simple satellite. The council also decreed that Object D be postponed until April 1958. The new Sputnik was a metallic sphere that would be a much lighter craft, weighing 83.8 kilograms (185 lb) and having a 58-centimeter (23 in) diameter. The satellite would not contain the complex instrumentation that Object D had, but had two radio transmitters operating on different short wave radio frequencies,
14560-401: The Earth above the magnetic equator. Van Allen was also the man who designed and built the satellite instrumentation of Explorer 1 . The satellite measured three phenomena: cosmic ray and radiation levels, the temperature in the spacecraft, and the frequency of collisions with micrometeorites. The satellite had no memory for data storage, therefore it had to transmit continuously. In March 1958
14784-401: The Exploration and Use of Outer Space for Peaceful Purposes . This agreement called for setting up a short, joint space project, during which one American astronaut would board the Russian space station Mir and two Russian cosmonauts would board a Space Shuttle. In September 1993, American Vice-President Al Gore Jr. , and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced plans for
15008-438: The International Space Station. Foale's Increment proceeded fairly normally until June 25, when a resupply ship collided with solar arrays on the Spektr module during the second test of the Progress manual docking system, TORU. The module's outer shell was hit and holed, which caused the station to lose pressure. This was the first on-orbit depressurization in the history of spaceflight. The crew quickly cut cables leading to
15232-400: The KGB (1973–1979), described active measures as "the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence ." During the Sino-Soviet split , "spy wars" also occurred between the USSR and PRC. In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform to impose orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in
15456-428: The Marshall Plan, seeing it as an effort by the US to impose its influence on Europe. In response, the Soviet Union established Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) to foster economic cooperation among communist states. The United States and its Western European allies sought to strengthen their bonds and used the policy of containment against Soviet influence; they accomplished this most notably through
15680-431: 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
15904-403: The Moon before the US with its N1 rocket but did not succeed, and eventually canceled it to concentrate on Salyut , the first space station program, and the first landings on Venus and on Mars . Meanwhile, the US landed five more Apollo crews on the Moon and continued exploration of other extraterrestrial bodies robotically. A period of détente followed with the April 1972 agreement on
16128-489: The Moon. Public interest in space travel originated in the 1951 publication of a Soviet youth magazine and was promptly picked up by US magazines. The competition began on July 30, 1955, when the United States announced its intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year . Four days later, the Soviet Union responded by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in
16352-529: The Moon. The 730-pound (330 kg) Ranger 4 became the first US spacecraft to reach the Moon, but its solar panels and navigational system failed near the Moon and it impacted the far side without returning any scientific data. Ranger 5 ran out of power and missed the Moon by 725 kilometers (391 nmi) on October 21, 1962. The first successful Ranger mission was the 806-pound (366 kg) Block III Ranger 7 which impacted on July 31, 1964. Ranger had three successful impactors out of nine attempts. In 1963,
16576-491: The Moon. The fifth attempt on June 18 also failed at launch. The 390-kilogram (860 lb) Luna 2 successfully impacted the Moon on September 14, 1959. The 278.5-kilogram (614 lb) Luna 3 successfully flew by the Moon and sent back pictures of its far side on October 7, 1959. The US first embarked on the Pioneer program in 1958 by launching the first probe , albeit ending in failure. A subsequent probe named Pioneer 1
16800-463: The R-1, R-2 and R-5 undertook various experiments between 1949 and 1958, including flights with space dogs . Design work began in 1953 on the R-7 Semyorka with the requirement for a missile with a launch mass of 170 to 200 tons, range of 8,500 km and carrying a 3,000 kg (6,600 lb) nuclear warhead, powerful enough to launch a nuclear warhead against the United States. In late 1953
17024-741: The Redstone Arsenal became NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center , with von Braun as its first director. Development of the Saturn rocket family , which when mature gave the US parity with the Soviets in terms of lifting capability, was thus transferred to NASA. In 1958, Korolev upgraded the R-7 to be able to launch a 400-kilogram (880 lb) payload to the Moon. The Luna program began with three failed secret 1958 attempts to launch Luna E-1 -class impactor probes. The fourth attempt, Luna 1 , launched successfully on January 2, 1959, but missed
17248-514: The Russian Civil War further complicated relations, and although the Soviet Union later allied with Western powers to defeat Nazi Germany , this cooperation was strained by mutual suspicions. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, disagreements about the future of Europe, particularly Eastern Europe , became central. The Soviet Union's establishment of communist regimes in the countries it had liberated from Nazi control—enforced by
17472-481: The Soviet Union and its communist party , which had an influence across the Second World and was also tied to a network of authoritarian states. The Soviet Union had a command economy and installed similarly communist regimes its in satellites. United States involvement in regime change during the Cold War included support for anti-communist and right-wing dictatorships , governments, and uprisings across
17696-467: The Soviet Union was used to monitor dissent from official Soviet politics and morals. Although to an extent disinformation had always existed, the term itself was invented, and the strategy formalized by a black propaganda department of the Soviet KGB. Based on the amount of top-secret Cold War archival information that has been released, historian Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably
17920-473: The Soviet Union's "2nd Generation" Luna programme was less successful, Luna 4 , Luna 5 , Luna 6 , Luna 7 , and Luna 8 were all met with mission failures. However, in 1966 Luna 9 achieved the first soft-landing on the Moon, and successfully transmitted photography from the surface. Luna 10 marked the first man-made object to establish an orbit around the Moon, followed by Luna 11 , Luna 12 , and Luna 14 which also successfully established orbits. Luna 12
18144-572: The Soviet Union, which at the time was undergoing the Era of Stagnation . This phase saw the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introducing the liberalizing reforms of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("reorganization") and ending Soviet involvement in Afghanistan in 1989. Pressures for national sovereignty grew stronger in Eastern Europe, and Gorbachev refused to further support
18368-558: The Soviet Union. A number of self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist governments were formed in the second half of the 1970s in developing countries , including Angola , Mozambique , Ethiopia , Cambodia , Afghanistan , and Nicaragua . Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. Beginning in the 1980s, this phase was another period of elevated tension. The Reagan Doctrine led to increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures on
18592-559: The Soviet embassy of his country's intention to launch a satellite as well, in the "near future". On August 30, 1955, Korolev managed to get the Soviet Academy of Sciences to create a commission whose purpose was to beat the Americans into Earth orbit: this was the de facto start date for the Space Race. The Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union began a policy of treating development of its space program as top-secret. When
18816-643: The Soviets accumulated after broken promises by Stalin and Molotov concerning Europe and Iran. Following the World War II Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran , the country was occupied by the Red Army in the far north and the British in the south. Iran was used by the United States and British to supply the Soviet Union, and the Allies agreed to withdraw from Iran within six months after the cessation of hostilities. However, when this deadline came,
19040-535: The Soviets agreed to withdraw from Iran after persistent US pressure, an early success of containment policy. By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman was outraged by the perceived resistance of the Soviet Union to American demands in Iran, Turkey, and Greece, as well as Soviet rejection of the Baruch Plan on nuclear weapons. In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance
19264-622: The Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures. The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point, set in motion a brief scare that war would occur, and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress. In an immediate aftermath of the crisis, the London Six-Power Conference was held, resulting in
19488-545: The Soviets remained in Iran under the guise of the Azerbaijan People's Government and Kurdish Republic of Mahabad . Shortly thereafter, on 5 March, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous " Iron Curtain " speech in Fulton, Missouri . The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" dividing Europe from " Stettin in
19712-520: The Sputnik project was first approved, one of the immediate courses of action the Politburo took was to consider what to announce to the world regarding their event. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) established precedents for all official announcements on the Soviet space program. The information eventually released did not offer details on who built and launched the satellite or why it
19936-599: The Station. The astronauts also received practice in carrying out spacewalks outside Mir and lessons in the Russian language , which would be used throughout their missions to talk with the other cosmonauts aboard the station and Mission Control in Russia, the TsUP . During their expeditions aboard Mir , the astronauts carried out various experiments, including growth of crops and crystals, and took hundreds of photographs of
20160-520: The Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans and Democrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War , but ultimately persisted thereafter. Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance, while European and American Communists , financed by
20384-526: The US Collier's magazine reacted with a series of seven articles Man Will Conquer Space Soon! detailing Wernher von Braun 's plans for crewed spaceflight. In March 1955, Disneyland's animated episode " Man in Space " in the US television with an audience of about 40 million people eventually fired the public enthusiasm for space travel and raised government interest, both in the US and USSR. Soon after
20608-515: The US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war . Under the leadership of Alcide De Gasperi the Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerful Communist – Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948 . All major powers engaged in espionage, using a great variety of spies, double agents , moles , and new technologies such as the tapping of telephone cables. The Soviet KGB ("Committee for State Security"),
20832-581: The US government gave to Western European countries over $ 13 billion (equivalent to $ 189 billion in 2016) to rebuild the economy of Europe . Later, the program led to the creation of the OECD . The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to the European balance of power , such as communist parties seizing control through revolutions or elections. The plan also stated that European prosperity
21056-588: The US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe. Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid. The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall Plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with central and eastern Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance ). Stalin
21280-486: The USSR but did not take him seriously. The Soviet success raised a great deal of concern in the United States. For example, economist Bernard Baruch wrote in an open letter titled "The Lessons of Defeat" to the New York Herald Tribune : "While we devote our industrial and technological power to producing new model automobiles and more gadgets, the Soviet Union is conquering space. ... It is Russia, not
21504-422: The USSR had achieved a leading advantage in rocket technology. The dumbfounded CIA estimated the launch weight at 500 metric tons requiring an initial thrust of more than 1,000 tons and supposed the use of a three-stage rocket. In a secret report, it concluded that ″the launching of two earth satellites must have been a stupendous scientific achievement. ... Launching of these satellites does indicate, however, that
21728-503: The USSR has perfected an ICBM which they can put on any desired target with accuracy." In reality, the launch weight of the Soviet rocket was 267 metric tons with an initial thrust of 410 tons with one and a half stages. The CIA's misjudgement was caused by extrapolating the parameters of the US Atlas rocket developed at the same time (launch weight 82 tons, initial thrust 135 tones, maximum payload of 70 kg for low Earth orbit ). In part,
21952-488: The USSR sent animals into space to determine the safety of the environment before sending the first humans. The USSR used dogs for this purpose, and the US used monkeys and apes . The first mammal in space was Albert II , a rhesus monkey launched by the US on a sub-orbital flight on June 14, 1949, who died on landing due to a parachute malfunction. The USSR sent the dog Laika into orbit on Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957, for an intended ten-day flight. They did not yet have
22176-483: The USSR. In this way, this US would exercise " preponderant power ," oppose neutrality, and establish global hegemony . In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the " Pactomania "), the US formalized a series of alliances with Japan (a former WWII enemy), South Korea , Taiwan , Australia , New Zealand , Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS in 1951 and SEATO in 1954), thereby guaranteeing
22400-527: The United Nations, was split up and dissolved in 1954 and 1975, also because of the détente between the West and Tito. The US and Britain merged their western German occupation zones into " Bizone " (1 January 1947, later "Trizone" with the addition of France's zone, April 1949). As part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948, representatives of a number of Western European governments and
22624-518: The United States a number of long-term military bases. One of the more significant examples of the implementation of containment was the United Nations US-led intervention in the Korean War . In June 1950, after years of mutual hostilities, Kim Il Sung 's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea at the 38th parallel . Stalin had been reluctant to support the invasion but ultimately sent advisers. To Stalin's surprise,
22848-581: The United States also fully funded and equipped with scientific equipment the Spektr module (launched in 1995) and the Priroda module (launched in 1996), making them de facto U.S. modules during the duration of the Shuttle- Mir program. During the four-year program, many firsts in spaceflight were achieved by the two nations, including the first American astronaut to launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft,
23072-401: The United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system. In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan , they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the West German economy, including the introduction of a new Deutsche Mark currency to replace the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased. The US had secretly decided that
23296-413: The United States, who has had the imagination to hitch its wagon to the stars and the skill to reach for the moon and all but grasp it. America is worried. It should be." Eisenhower ordered project Vanguard to move up its timetable and launch its satellite much sooner than originally planned. The December 6, 1957 Project Vanguard launch failure occurred at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It
23520-505: The United States. Shuttle-Mir program The Shuttle– Mir program ( Russian : Программа «Мир»–«Шаттл» ) was a collaborative space program between Russia and the United States that involved American Space Shuttles visiting the Russian space station Mir , Russian cosmonauts flying on the Shuttle, and an American astronaut flying aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to allow American astronauts to engage in long-duration expeditions aboard Mir . The project, sometimes called "Phase One",
23744-467: The Vostok program was over. The craft consisted of a spherical descent module with a mass of 2.46 tonnes (5,400 lb) and a diameter of 2.3 meters (7.5 ft), with a cylindrical inner cabin housing the cosmonaut, instruments, and escape system; and a biconic instrument module with a mass of 2.27 tonnes (5,000 lb), 2.25 meters (7.4 ft) long and 2.43 meters (8.0 ft) in diameter, containing
23968-510: The Warsaw Pact's primary function was to safeguard Soviet hegemony over its Eastern European satellites, with the pact's only direct military actions having been the invasions of its own member states to keep them from breaking away; in the 1960s, the pact evolved into a multilateral alliance, in which the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact members gained significant scope to pursue their own interests. In 1961, Soviet-allied East Germany constructed
24192-472: The Western agencies paid special attention to debriefing Eastern Bloc defectors . Edward Jay Epstein describes that the CIA understood that the KGB used "provocations", or fake defections, as a trick to embarrass Western intelligence and establish Soviet double agents. As a result, from 1959 to 1973, the CIA required that East Bloc defectors went through a counterintelligence investigation before being recruited as
24416-460: The ability to detect if a meteoroid were to penetrate its pressure hull, and the ability to detect the density of the Earth's thermosphere . Korolev was buoyed by the first successful launches of the R-7 rocket in August and September, which paved the way for the launch of Sputnik . Word came that the US was planning to announce a major breakthrough at an International Geophysical Year conference at
24640-462: The accusation that the USSR was exerting increasing control over the countries lying in its sphere. He argued that there was nothing surprising in "the fact that the Soviet Union, anxious for its future safety, [was] trying to see to it that governments loyal in their attitude to the Soviet Union should exist in these countries." Soviet territorial demands to Turkey regarding the Dardanelles in
24864-561: The allocation of $ 400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine , which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes. American policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence even though Stalin had told the Communist Party to cooperate with the British-backed government. Enunciation of
25088-450: The attitudes of the program administrators. Nevertheless, a large amount of science, expertise in space station construction and knowledge in working in a cooperative space venture was gained from the combined operations, allowing the construction of the ISS to proceed much more smoothly than would have otherwise been the case. The origins of the Shuttle– Mir program can be traced back to the 1975 Apollo–Soyuz Test Project , that resulted in
25312-448: The basis for the R-7 family which includes Sputnik , Luna , Molniya , Vostok , and Voskhod space launchers , as well as later Soyuz variants. Several versions are still in use and it has become the world's most reliable space launcher. Although American rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard developed, patented, and flew small liquid-propellant rockets as early as 1914, the United States
25536-470: The book Cold War Space Sleuths (Springer-Praxis 2013): "The USSR was famously described by Winston Churchill as 'a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma' and nothing signified this more than the search for the truth behind its space program during the Cold War. Although the Space Race was literally played out above our heads, it was often obscured by a figurative 'space curtain' that took much effort to see through". Initially, President Eisenhower
25760-426: The bureau responsible for foreign espionage and internal surveillance, was famous for its effectiveness. The most famous Soviet operation involved its atomic spies that delivered crucial information from the United States' Manhattan Project , leading the USSR to detonate its first nuclear weapon in 1949, four years after the American detonation and much sooner than expected. A massive network of informants throughout
25984-442: The capsule at a different location. This made Linenger the first American to undock from a space station aboard two different spacecraft (Space Shuttle and Soyuz). Linenger and his Russian crewmates Vasili Tsibliyev and Aleksandr Lazutkin faced several difficulties during the mission. These included the most severe fire aboard an orbiting spacecraft (caused by a backup oxygen-generating device), failures of various on board systems,
26208-513: The capsule was just large enough for a single astronaut. The first suborbital spacecraft weighed 3,000 pounds (1,400 kg); the heaviest, Mercury-Atlas 9, weighed 3,000 pounds (1,400 kg) fully loaded. On reentry, the astronaut would stay in the craft through splashdown by parachute in the Atlantic Ocean. On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, launching in a ballistic trajectory on Mercury-Redstone 3 , in
26432-593: The captured V-2s and began a program of launching them and instructing American engineers in their operation. These tests led to the first photos of Earth from space , and the first two-stage rocket, the WAC Corporal - V-2 combination, in 1949. The German rocket team was moved from Fort Bliss to the Army's new Redstone Arsenal , located in Huntsville, Alabama , in 1950. From here, von Braun and his team developed
26656-716: The chancellor of West Germany, with France the main opponent. Washington had the decisive voice. It was strongly supported by the Pentagon (the US military leadership), and weakly opposed by President Truman; the State Department was ambivalent. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 changed the calculations and Washington now gave full support. That also involved naming Dwight D. Eisenhower in charge of NATO forces and sending more American troops to West Germany. There
26880-515: The communist party. Radio and television organizations were state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party. Soviet radio broadcasts used Marxist rhetoric to attack capitalism, emphasizing themes of labor exploitation, imperialism and war-mongering. Along with the broadcasts of the BBC and the Voice of America to Central and Eastern Europe,
27104-455: The condition of hardware and running cables through a special hatch from Spektr 's systems to the rest of the station. Following these first investigations, Foale and Solovyev conducted a 6-hour EVA on the surface of Spektr to inspect the damaged module. After these incidents, the US Congress and NASA considered whether to abandon the program out of concern for astronauts' safety but NASA administrator Daniel Goldin decided to continue
27328-420: The construction of the International Space Station (ISS). The program was announced in 1993, the first mission started in 1994 and the project continued until its scheduled completion in 1998. Eleven Space Shuttle missions, a joint Soyuz flight and almost 1,000 cumulative days in space for American astronauts occurred over the course of seven long-duration expeditions. In addition to Space Shuttle launches to Mir
27552-497: The country and was banned following the 1991 Soviet coup attempt that August. This in turn led to the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the collapse of Communist governments across much of Africa and Asia. The Russian Federation became the Soviet Union's successor state, while many of the other republics emerged from the Soviet Union's collapse as fully independent post-Soviet states . The United States
27776-525: The course of the flight, nearly 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of water were transferred to Mir and experiment samples including blood, urine and saliva were moved to Atlantis for return to Earth. Continuous US presence aboard Mir started in 1996 with the March 22 launch of Atlantis on mission STS-76 , when the Second Increment astronaut Shannon Lucid was transferred to the station. STS-76
28000-404: The crew of Atlantis moved supplies to the station and returned to Earth the first plants to complete a life cycle in space; a crop of wheat planted by Shannon Lucid. During five days of mated operations, the crews transferred nearly 6,000 pounds (2,700 kg) of logistics to Mir , and transferred 2,400 pounds (1,100 kg) of materials back to Atlantis (the most materials transferred between
28224-597: The docking missions that followed. Five weeks after Discovery 's flight, the March 14 launch of Soyuz TM-21 carried expedition EO-18 to Mir . The crew consisted of cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov and NASA astronaut Norman Thagard , who became the first American to fly into space aboard the Soyuz spacecraft . During the course of their 115-day expedition, the Spektr science module (which served as living and working space for American astronauts)
28448-649: The early 1990s to begin a collaborative, multi-national, space station project. In the Russian Federation , as the successor to much of the Soviet Union and its space program, the deteriorating economic situation in the post-Soviet economic chaos led to growing financial problems of the now Russian space station program. The construction of the Mir-2 space station as a replacement for the aging Mir became illusionary, though only after its base block, DOS-8, had been built. These developments resulted in bringing
28672-458: The eight-day flight saw the first rendezvous of a Space Shuttle with Mir , as Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Titov and the rest of Discovery 's crew approached within 37 feet (11 m) of Mir . Following the rendezvous, Collins performed a flyaround of the station. The mission, a dress rehearsal for the first docked mission in the program, STS-71 , also carried out testing of various techniques and pieces of equipment that would be used during
28896-470: The end of World War II, the two former allies became engaged in a state of political conflict and military tension known as the Cold War (1947–1991), which polarized Europe between the Soviet Union's satellite states (often referred to as the Eastern Bloc ) and the states of the Western world allied with the U.S. In August 1949, the Soviet Union became the second nuclear power after the United States with
29120-436: The engine system and propellant. After reentry, the cosmonaut would eject at about 7,000 meters (23,000 ft) over the USSR and descend via parachute, while the capsule would land separately, because the descent module made an extremely rough landing that could have left a cosmonaut seriously injured. The "Vostok spaceship" was first displayed at the July 1961 Tushino air show , mounted on its launch vehicle's third stage, with
29344-512: The expedition EO-18 crew. Atlantis also carried out on-orbit joint US-Russian life sciences investigations aboard a Spacelab module and performed a logistical resupply of the station. The final Shuttle flight of 1995, STS-74 , began with the November 12 launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis , and delivered the Russian-built Docking Module to Mir , along with a new pair of solar arrays and other hardware upgrades for
29568-408: The fall of the communist governments of Europe from 1989, which concluded with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Western Bloc included the US and a number of First World nations that were generally capitalist and liberal democratic but tied to a network of often authoritarian Third World states, most of which were the European powers' former colonies . The Eastern Bloc was led by
29792-604: The far side of the moon. In late 1966, Luna 13 became the third spacecraft to make a soft-landing on the Moon, with the American Surveyor 1 having now taken second. Later on, to aid the Apollo missions, the Surveyor program was conducted by NASA, with five successful soft landings out of seven attempts from 1966 to 1968. The Lunar Orbiter program had five successes out of five attempts in 1966–1967. The US and
30016-444: The favourable data of the Soviet launcher was based on concepts proposed by the German rocket scientists headed by Helmut Gröttrup on Gorodomlya Island , such as, among other things, the rigorous weight saving, the control of the residual fuel quantities and a reduced thrust to weight relation of 1.4 instead of usual factor 2. The CIA had heard about such details already in January 1954 when it interrogated Göttrup after his return from
30240-491: The final Shuttle– Mir mission, STS-91 . The mission closed out Phase One, with the EO-25 and STS-91 crews transferring water to Mir and exchanging almost 4,700 pounds (2,100 kg) of cargo experiments and supplies between the two spacecraft. Long-term American experiments that had been on board Mir were also moved into Discovery . Hatches were closed for undocking at 9:07 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) on June 8 and
30464-435: The final outfitting of the station, completed in 2012. In 2015, a reconfiguration of the American segment was completed to allow its docking ports to accommodate NASA-sponsored commercial crew vehicles, that were expected to start visiting the ISS in 2018. As of June 2015 , the ISS has a pressurized volume of 915 cubic metres (32,300 cu ft), and its pressurized modules total 51 metres (167 ft) in length, plus
30688-527: The fire aboard the station and collision with the Progress supply vessel in 1997. The fire, caused by the malfunction of a backup solid-fuel oxygen generator (SFOG), burned for, according to various sources, between 90 seconds and 14 minutes, and produced large amounts of toxic smoke that filled the station for around 45 minutes. This forced the crew to don respirators, but some of the respirator masks initially worn were broken. Fire extinguishers mounted on
30912-529: The first docking between an American Space Shuttle and the station. On June 29, Atlantis successfully docked with Mir , becoming the first US spacecraft to dock with a Russian spacecraft since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Atlantis delivered cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Nikolai Budarin , who would form the expedition EO-19 crew, and retrieved astronaut Norman Thagard and cosmonauts Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov of
31136-531: The flight of Atlantis on STS-79 , which launched on September 16. STS-79 was the first Shuttle mission to carry a double Spacehab module. More than 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg) of supplies were transferred to Mir , including water generated by Atlantis 's fuel cells , and experiments that included investigations into superconductors , cartilage development, and other biology studies. About 2,000 pounds (910 kg) of experiment samples and equipment were also transferred back from Mir to Atlantis , making
31360-441: The flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-89 . The mission delivered cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov to Mir and replaced David Wolf with Andy Thomas , following Wolf's 119-day Increment. During his Increment, the last of the program, Thomas worked on 27 science investigations into areas of advanced technology, Earth sciences , human life sciences, microgravity research, and ISS risk mitigation. His stay on Mir , considered
31584-401: The formation of NATO , which was essentially a defensive agreement in 1949. The Soviet Union countered with the Warsaw Pact in 1955, which had similar results with the Eastern Bloc. As by that time the Soviet Union already had an armed presence and political domination all over its eastern satellite states, the pact has been long considered superfluous. Although nominally a defensive alliance,
31808-656: The former adversaries together with the Shuttle– Mir Program, which would pave the way to the International Space Station , a joint project with several international partners. In June 1992, American President George H. W. Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed to co-operate on space exploration by signing the Agreement between the United States of America and the Russian Federation Concerning Cooperation in
32032-402: The go-ahead to launch their Jupiter-C rocket as soon as they could. In Britain, the US's Western Cold War ally, the reaction was mixed: some celebrated the fact that the Soviets had reached space first, while others feared the destructive potential that military uses of spacecraft might bring. The Daily Express predicted that the US would catch up to and pass the USSR in space; "never doubt for
32256-529: The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of "cold war" with its neighbours. In The Observer of 10 March 1946, Orwell wrote, "...after the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a 'cold war' on Britain and the British Empire." The first use of the term to describe
32480-406: The largest spacecraft ever to have been assembled at that time in history, and the first American spacewalk using a Russian Orlan spacesuit . The program was marred by various concerns, notably the safety of Mir following a fire, a Russian spacecraft colliding with Spektr rendering it uninhabitable, financial issues with the cash-strapped Russian space program and worries from astronauts about
32704-407: The launch of Chinese Tiangong-1 space laboratory on 29 September 2011. Mir 's legacy lives on in the station, bringing together five space agencies in the cause of exploration and allowing those space agencies to prepare for their next leap into space, to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Criticism of the program was primarily concerned with the safety of the aging Mir , particularly following
32928-402: The loyalty of non-aligned countries , such as India . By the 1970s, Japan and Western Europe rebuilt their economies, allowing them more diplomatic independence. After the Sino-Soviet split between the USSR and China in 1961, the U.S. initiated contacts with China in 1972 . In the same year, the US and USSR signed a series of treaties limiting their nuclear arsenals, which eased tensions for
33152-400: The majority of their science aboard the station. These missions allowed NASA and Roscosmos to learn a great deal about how best to work with international partners in space and how to minimize the risks associated with assembling a large space station in orbit, as would have to be done with the ISS. The project also served as a political ruse on the part of the American government, providing
33376-465: The mission to justify the death of the dog...". On August 19, 1960, the dogs Belka and Strelka were sent into orbit aboard Sputnik 5 and safely returned. The Americans sent the chimpanzee Ham on a suborbital flight of the Mercury capsule on Mercury-Redstone 2 and recovered him safely on January 31, 1961. The chimpanzee Enos was launched on Mercury-Atlas 5 on November 29, 1961, into what
33600-652: The mission was the Wake Shield Facility (or WSF), a device designed to generate new semiconductor films for advanced electronics. The WSF was flown at the end of Discovery 's robotic arm over the course of the flight. During the mission, the astronauts aboard Discovery also carried out various experiments aboard the Spacehab module in the Orbiter's payload bay, and took part in a live bi-directional audio and downlink video hookup between themselves and
33824-416: The module and closed Spektr 's hatch in order to prevent the need to abandon the station in their Soyuz lifeboat. Their efforts stabilized the station's air pressure, whilst the pressure in Spektr , containing many of Foale's experiments and personal effects, dropped to a vacuum. Fortunately, food, water and other vital supplies were stored in other modules, and salvage and replanning effort by Foale and
34048-414: The most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan. Soviet and Eastern Bloc authorities used various methods to suppress Western broadcasts, including radio jamming . American policymakers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles , acknowledged that
34272-472: The near future". The launching of satellites was enabled by developments in ballistic missile capabilities since the end of World War II. The competition gained Western public attention with the " Sputnik crisis ", when the USSR achieved the first successful satellite launch, Sputnik 1 , on October 4, 1957. It gained momentum when the USSR sent the first human, Yuri Gagarin , into space with the orbital flight of Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. These were followed by
34496-511: The newly founded Russian Federation to end their Cold War competition also in space, by agreeing in 1993 on the Shuttle– Mir and International Space Station programs . Although Germans, Americans and Soviets experimented with small liquid-fuel rockets before World War II, launching satellites and humans into space required the development of larger ballistic missiles such as Wernher von Braun 's Aggregat-4 (A-4) , which became known as
34720-485: The newspaper Pionerskaya pravda for young readers. He described a two-person interplanetary spaceship of the future and the industrial and technological processes required to create it. He ended the short article with a clear forecast of the future: "We do not have long to wait. We can assume that the bold dream of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky will be realized within the next 10 to 15 years." From March 1952 to April 1954,
34944-423: The nose cone in place concealing the spherical capsule. A tail section with eight fins was added in an apparent attempt to confuse western observers. This also appeared on official commemorative stamps and a documentary. The Soviets finally revealed the true appearance of their Vostok capsule at the April 1965 Moscow Economic Exhibition. On April 12, 1961, the USSR surprised the world by launching Yuri Gagarin into
35168-475: The pair affixed a 121-pound (55 kg) Solar Array Cap to the Docking Module , for a future attempt by crew members to seal off the leak in Spektr 's hull. The mission returned Foale to Earth, along with samples, hardware, and an old Elektron oxygen generator, and dropped Wolf off on the Station ready for his 128-day Increment. Wolf had originally been scheduled to be the final Mir astronaut, but
35392-671: The policy change. Once again, the East Berlin communists attempted to disrupt the Berlin municipal elections , which were held on 5 December 1948 and produced a turnout of 86% and an overwhelming victory for the non-communist parties. The results effectively divided the city into East and West, the latter comprising US, British and French sectors. 300,000 Berliners demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue, and US Air Force pilot Gail Halvorsen created " Operation Vittles ", which supplied candy to German children. The Airlift
35616-441: The political decision-making level on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any major political or military decision that was prematurely discovered through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side. According to historian Robert L. Benson, "Washington's forte
35840-479: The presence of the Red Army —alarmed the US and UK. Western leaders saw this as a clear instance of Soviet expansionism, clashing with their vision of a democratic Europe. Economically, the divide was sharpened with the introduction of the Marshall Plan in 1947, a US initiative to provide financial aid to rebuild Europe and prevent the spread of communism by stabilizing capitalist economies. The Soviet Union rejected
36064-416: The program. The next flight to Mir , STS-86 , brought Increment astronaut David Wolf to the station. STS-86 performed the seventh Shuttle– Mir docking, the last of 1997. During Atlantis 's stay crew members Titov and Parazynski conducted the first joint US–Russian extravehicular activity during a Shuttle mission, and the first in which a Russian wore a US spacesuit. During the five-hour spacewalk,
36288-616: The project. A-4s were assembled and studied and the experience derived from assembling and launching A4 rockets was directly applied to the Soviet copy, called the R-1 , with NII-88 chief designer Sergei Korolev overseeing the R-1's development., The R-1 entered into service in the Soviet Army on 28 November 1950. By the latter half of 1946, Korolev and rocket engineer Valentin Glushko had, with extensive input from German engineers, outlined
36512-485: The proposed US satellites, having a weight of 1,400 kilograms (3,100 lb), of which 300 kilograms (660 lb) would be composed of scientific instruments that would photograph the Earth, take readings on radiation levels, and check on the planet's magnetic field. However, things were not going along well with the design and manufacturing of the satellite, so in February 1957, Korolev sought and received permission from
36736-426: The science community minimized the loss of research data and capability. In an effort to restore some of the power and systems lost following the isolation of Spektr and to attempt to locate the leak, Mir 's new commander Anatoly Solovyev and flight engineer Pavel Vinogradov carried out a salvage operation later in the mission. They entered the empty module during a so-called "IVA" spacewalk, inspecting
36960-424: The size or shape of their rockets or cabins or most of their spaceships, except for the first Sputniks, lunar probes, and Venus probe. The Soviet military maintained control over the space program; Korolev's OKB-1 design bureau was subordinated under the Ministry of General Machine Building , tasked with the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and continued to give its assets random identifiers into
37184-425: The smoothest of the entire Phase One program, featured weekly "Letters from the Outpost" from Thomas and passed two milestones for length of spaceflight—815 consecutive days in space by American astronauts since the launch of Shannon Lucid on the STS-76 mission in March 1996, and 907 days of Mir occupancy by American astronauts dating back to Norman Thagard's trip to Mir in March 1995. Thomas returned to Earth on
37408-405: The source of the term, Lippmann traced it to a French term from the 1930s, la guerre froide . The roots of the Cold War can be traced back to diplomatic and military tensions preceding World War II. The 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , where Soviet Russia ceded vast territories to Germany, deepened distrust among the Western Allies. Allied intervention in
37632-499: The space program and the Soviet populace. The program's nature embodied ambiguous messages concerning its goals, successes, and values. The program itself was so secret that a regular Soviet citizen could never achieve a concrete image of it, but rather a superficial picture of its history, present activities, or future endeavors. Launchings were not announced until they took place. Cosmonaut names were not released until they flew. Mission details were sparse. Outside observers did not know
37856-414: The spacecraft separated at 12:01 p.m. EDT that day. With the landing of Discovery on June 12, 1998, the Phase One program concluded. Techniques and equipment developed during the program assisted the development of Phase Two: initial assembly of the International Space Station (ISS). The arrival of the Destiny Laboratory Module in 2001 marked the end of Phase Two and the start of Phase Three,
38080-463: The specific post-war geopolitical confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States came in a speech by Bernard Baruch , an influential advisor to Democratic presidents, on 16 April 1947. The speech, written by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope , proclaimed, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war." Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency with his book The Cold War . When asked in 1947 about
38304-505: The stage was set for nationalistic competition. On July 29, 1955, James C. Hagerty , President Dwight D. Eisenhower 's press secretary, announced that the United States intended to launch "small Earth circling satellites" between July 1, 1957, and December 31, 1958, as part of the US contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY). On August 2, at the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen, scientist Leonid I. Sedov told international reporters at
38528-416: The station, long-duration flights aboard Mir by American astronauts. The seven astronauts who took part in the Increments, Norman Thagard , Shannon Lucid , John Blaha , Jerry Linenger , Michael Foale , David Wolf and Andrew Thomas , were each flown in turn to Star City , Russia , to undergo training in various aspects of the operation of Mir and the Soyuz spacecraft used for transport to and from
38752-417: The station. During his Increment, Linenger became the first American to conduct a spacewalk from a foreign space station and the first to test the Russian-built Orlan-M spacesuit alongside Russian cosmonaut Vasili Tsibliyev . All three crewmembers of expedition EO-23 performed a "fly-around" in the Soyuz spacecraft, first undocking from one docking port of the station, then manually flying to and redocking
38976-427: The station. The Docking Module was designed to provide more clearance for Shuttles in order to prevent any collisions with Mir 's solar arrays during docking, a problem which had been overcome during STS-71 by relocating the station's Kristall module to a different location on the station. The module, attached to Kristall 's docking port, prevented the need for this procedure on further missions. During
39200-407: The successful RDS-1 nuclear weapon test. In October 1957, the Soviet Union conducted the world’s first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), this was the R-7 Semyorka (also known as SS-6 by NATO) and was seen as capable of striking U.S. territory with a nuclear payload. Fears in the US due to this perceived threat became known as the Missile gap . The first American ICBM,
39424-453: The technology to return Laika safely to Earth, and the government reported Laika died when the oxygen ran out, but in October 2002 her true cause of death was reported as stress and overheating on the fourth orbit due to failure of the air conditioning system. At a Moscow press conference in 1998 Oleg Gazenko , a senior Soviet scientist involved in the project, stated "The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We did not learn enough from
39648-424: The test equipment and radio gear that was present in the previous launches. It arrived at the Soviet missile base Tyura-Tam in September and was prepared for its mission at launch site number one . The first launch took place on Friday, October 4, 1957, at exactly 10:28:34 pm Moscow time, with the R-7 and the now named Sputnik 1 satellite lifting off the launch pad and placing the artificial "moon" into an orbit
39872-414: The three cosmonauts on board Mir , Valeri Polyakov , Viktor Afanasyev and Yury Usachev (flying Mir expeditions LD-4 and EO-15). 1995 began with the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery on February 3. Discovery's mission, STS-63 , was the second Space Shuttle flight in the program and the first flight of the shuttle with a female pilot, Eileen Collins . Referred to as the "near- Mir " mission,
40096-425: The time of the NACA. It consisted of a conical capsule with a cylindrical pack of three solid-fuel retro-rockets strapped over a beryllium or fiberglass heat shield on the blunt end. Base diameter at the blunt end was 6.0 feet (1.8 m) and length was 10.8 feet (3.3 m); with the launch escape system added, the overall length was 25.9 feet (7.9 m). With 100 cubic feet (2.8 m) of habitable volume,
40320-461: The total transfer the most extensive yet. This, the fourth docking, also saw John Blaha transferring onto Mir to take his place as resident Increment astronaut. His stay on the station improved operations in several areas, including transfer procedures for a docked space shuttle, "hand-over" procedures for long-duration American crew members and "Ham" amateur radio communications. Two spacewalks were carried out during his time aboard. Their aim
40544-405: The two superpowers , though each supported opposing sides in major regional conflicts known as proxy wars . Aside from the nuclear arms race starting in 1949 and conventional military deployment , the struggle for dominance was expressed indirectly via psychological warfare , propaganda campaigns , espionage , far-reaching embargoes , sports diplomacy , and technological competitions such as
40768-432: The two craft a controlled distance apart. Vostok 4 also set a record of nearly four days in space. The first woman, Valentina Tereshkova , was launched into space on Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, as (possibly) a medical experiment. She was the only one to fly of a small group of female parachutist factory workers (unlike the male cosmonauts who were military test pilots), chosen by the head of cosmonaut training because he read
40992-438: The two spacecraft to that date). The STS-81 crew also tested the Shuttle Treadmill Vibration Isolation and Stabilization System (TVIS), designed for use in the Zvezda module of the International Space Station. The shuttle's small vernier jet thrusters were fired during the mated operations to gather engineering data for "reboosting" the ISS. After undocking, Atlantis performed a fly-around of Mir , leaving Linenger aboard
41216-399: The two spacecraft, along with water, experiment samples, supplies and hardware. One of the first items transferred to Mir was an Elektron oxygen-generating unit. Atlantis was stopped three times while backing away during the undocking sequence on May 21. The aim was to collect data from a European sensor device designed for future rendezvous of ESA 's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) with
41440-440: The warhead's mass was increased to 5.5 to 6 tons to accommodate the then planned theromonuclear bomb . The R-7 was designed in a two-stage configuration, with four boosters that would jettison when empty. On the 21 August 1957 the R-7 flew 6,000 km (3,700 mi), and became the worlds's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Two months later the R-7 launched Sputnik 1 , the first artificial satellite, into orbit, and became
41664-411: The world, while Soviet involvement in regime change included the funding of left-wing parties , wars of independence , revolutions and dictatorships. As nearly all the colonial states underwent decolonization and achieved independence in the period from 1945 to 1960, many became Third World battlefields in the Cold War. At the end of World War II, English writer George Orwell used cold war , as
41888-400: The world. Movements against nuclear weapons testing and for nuclear disarmament took place, with large anti-war protests . By the 1970s, both sides had started making allowances for peace and security, ushering in a period of détente that saw the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the 1972 visit by Richard Nixon to China that opened relations with China as a strategic counterweight to
42112-400: Was 'signals' intelligence - the procurement and analysis of coded foreign messages." leading to the Venona project or Venona intercepts, which monitored the communications of Soviet intelligence agents. Moynihan wrote that the Venona project contained "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." The Venona project
42336-435: Was Space Transportation System (STS) , taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft of which it was the only item funded for development. The first of four orbital test flights occurred in 1981, leading to operational flights beginning in 1982. In addition to the prototype, whose completion was cancelled, five complete Shuttle systems were built and used on a total of 135 missions from 1981 to 2011, launched from
42560-425: Was a monumental failure, exploding a few seconds after launch, and it became an international joke. The satellite appeared in newspapers under the names Flopnik, Stayputnik, Kaputnik, and Dudnik. In the United Nations, the Soviet delegate offered the US representative aid "under the Soviet program of technical assistance to backwards nations." Only in the wake of this very public failure did von Braun's Redstone team get
42784-424: Was a period of global geopolitical tension and struggle for ideological and economic influence between the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) 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 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The term cold war is used because there was no direct fighting between
43008-440: Was a satellite mission that failed, expedited plans to get his own satellite in orbit. Since the R-7 was substantially more powerful than any of the US launch vehicles , he made sure to take full advantage of this capability by designing Object D as his primary satellite. It was given the designation 'D', to distinguish it from other R-7 payload designations 'A', 'B', 'V', and 'G' which were nuclear weapon payloads. Object D dwarfed
43232-412: Was a strong promise that West Germany would not develop nuclear weapons. Widespread fears of another rise of German militarism necessitated the new military to operate within an alliance framework under NATO command. In 1955, Washington secured full German membership of NATO. In May 1953, Lavrentiy Beria , by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of
43456-407: Was able to transmit detailed photography of the surface from orbit. Luna 10, 12, and Luna 14 conducted Gamma ray spectrometry of the Moon, among other tests. The Zond programme was orchestrated alongside the Luna programme with Zond 1 and Zond 2 launching in 1964, intended as flyby missions, however both failed. Zond 3 however was successful, and transmitted high quality photography from
43680-418: Was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of threat to the Soviet Union. In early 1948, following reports of strengthening "reactionary elements", Czech Communists executed a coup d'état in Czechoslovakia (resulting in the formation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (9 May 1948)), the only Eastern Bloc state that
43904-420: Was anticipated to visit Mir , but its program was canceled after its first uncrewed spaceflight. Visiting US Space Shuttles used an Androgynous Peripheral Attach System docking collar originally designed for Buran, mounted on a bracket originally designed for use with the American Space Station Freedom . With the Space Shuttle docked to Mir , the temporary enlargements of living and working areas amounted to
44128-433: Was as much a logistical as a political and psychological success for the West; it firmly linked West Berlin to the United States. In May 1949, Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade. In 1952, Stalin repeatedly proposed a plan to unify East and West Germany under a single government chosen in elections supervised by the United Nations, if the new Germany were to stay out of Western military alliances, but this proposal
44352-429: Was carried out in the 1930s by the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD), where Soviet rocket pioneers Sergey Korolev , Friedrich Zander , Mikhail Tikhonravov and Leonid Dushkin launched GIRD-X , the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket in 1933. In 1933 the two design bureaus were combined into the Reactive Scientific Research Institute and produced the RP-318, the USSR's first rocket-powered aircraft and
44576-420: Was chosen to go on the Increment instead of astronaut Wendy Lawrence . Lawrence was deemed ineligible for flight because of a change in Russian requirements after the Progress supply vehicle collision. The new rules required that all Mir crew members should be trained and ready for spacewalks, but a Russian spacesuit could not be prepared for Lawrence in time for launch. The final year of Phase One began with
44800-453: Was constructed between 1986 and 1996 and was the world's first modular space station. It was the first consistently inhabited long-term research station in space, and previously held the record for longest continuous human presence in space, at eight days short of ten years. Mir 's purpose was to provide a large and habitable scientific laboratory in space, and, through a number of collaborations, including Intercosmos and Shuttle– Mir ,
45024-449: Was contingent upon German economic recovery. One month later, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 , creating a unified Department of Defense , the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council (NSC). These would become the main bureaucracies for US defense policy in the Cold War. Stalin believed economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that
45248-537: Was followed during the course of the project by nine Shuttle– Mir docking missions, from STS-71 to STS-91 . The Shuttle rotated crews and delivered supplies, and one mission, STS-74 , carried a docking module and a pair of solar arrays to Mir . Various scientific experiments were also conducted, both on shuttle flights and long-term aboard the station. The project also saw the launch of two new modules, Spektr and Priroda , to Mir , which were used by American astronauts as living quarters and laboratories to conduct
45472-404: Was in 1921 when the Soviet military sanctioned the Gas Dynamics Laboratory , a small research laboratory to explore solid-fuel rockets, led by Nikolai Tikhomirov , who had begun studying solid and liquid-fueled rockets in 1894, and obtained a patent in 1915 for "self-propelled aerial and water-surface mines. The first test-firing of a solid fuel rocket was carried out in 1928. Further development
45696-416: Was intended to allow the United States to learn from Russian experience with long-duration spaceflight and to foster a spirit of cooperation between the two nations and their space agencies , the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Russian Space Agency (PKA). The project helped to prepare the way for further cooperative space ventures; specifically, "Phase Two" of the joint project,
45920-402: Was kept highly secret even from policymakers until the Moynihan Commission in 1995. Despite this, the decryption project had already been betrayed and dispatched to the USSR by Kim Philby and Bill Weisband in 1946, as was discovered by the US by 1950. Nonetheless, the Soviets had to keep their discovery of the program secret, too, and continued leaking their own information, some of which
46144-431: Was launched aboard a Proton rocket and docked to Mir . Spektr carried more than 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of research equipment from America and other nations. The expedition's crew returned to Earth aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis following the first Shuttle– Mir docking during mission STS-71 . The primary objectives of STS-71, launched on June 27, called for the Space Shuttle Atlantis to rendezvous and perform
46368-588: Was launched with the intention of orbiting the Moon only to result in a partial mission success when it reached an apogee of 113,800 km before falling back to Earth. The missions of Pioneer 2 and Pioneer 3 failed whereas Pioneer 4 had one partially successful lunar flyby in March 1959. The Ranger program was started in 1959 by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory . The Block I Ranger 1 and Ranger 2 suffered Atlas-Agena launch failures in August and November 1961. The 727-pound (330 kg) Block II Ranger 3 launched successfully on January 26, 1962, but missed
46592-427: Was launched. However, the public release is illuminating in what it does reveal: "there is an abundance of arcane scientific and technical data... as if to overwhelm the reader with mathematics in the absence of even a picture of the object". The Soviet space program's use of secrecy served as both a tool to prevent the leaking of classified information between countries, and also to create a mysterious barrier between
46816-454: Was left as the world's sole superpower. In February 1946, George F. Kennan 's " Long Telegram " from Moscow to Washington helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, which would become the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War. The telegram galvanized a policy debate that would eventually shape the Truman administration 's Soviet policy. Washington's opposition to
47040-505: Was made internationally accessible to cosmonauts and astronauts of many different countries. The station existed until March 23, 2001, at which point it was deliberately deorbited, and broke apart during atmospheric re-entry. Mir was based upon the Salyut series of space stations previously launched by the Soviet Union (seven Salyut space stations had been launched since 1971), and was mainly serviced by Russian-crewed Soyuz spacecraft and Progress cargo ships. The Buran space shuttle
47264-424: Was not allowed to put a satellite into orbit with their Jupiter-C rocket, because of its intended use as a future military vehicle. On September 20, 1956, von Braun and his team did launch a Jupiter-C that was capable of putting a satellite into orbit, but the launch was used only as a suborbital test of reentry vehicle technology. Korolev received word about von Braun's 1956 Jupiter-C test and, mistakenly thinking it
47488-488: Was now restricted to the island of Taiwan , the nationalist government of which exists to this day. The Kremlin promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China. According to Norwegian historian Odd Arne Westad , the communists won the Civil War because they made fewer military mistakes than Chiang Kai-Shek made, and because in his search for a powerful centralized government, Chiang antagonized too many interest groups in China. Moreover, his party
47712-425: Was on its way to completing its first orbit. About 95 minutes after launch, the satellite flew over its launch site, and its radio signals were picked up by the engineers and military personnel at Tyura-Tam: that's when Korolev and his team celebrated the first successful artificial satellite placed into Earth-orbit. At the latest, the successful start of Sputnik 2 with its weight of more than 500 kg proved that
47936-403: Was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. However, the Soviets probably had an advantage in terms of HUMINT (human intelligence or interpersonal espionage) and "sometimes in its reach into high policy circles." In terms of decisive impact, however, he concludes: We also can now have high confidence in the judgment that there were no successful "moles" at
48160-427: Was still useful to the American program. According to Moynihan, even President Truman may not have been fully informed of Venona, which may have left him unaware of the extent of Soviet espionage. Clandestine atomic spies from the Soviet Union, who infiltrated the Manhattan Project at various points during WWII, played a major role in increasing tensions that led to the Cold War. In addition to usual espionage,
48384-402: Was supposed to be a three-orbit flight. However, the mission was aborted after two orbits due to capsule overheating, and a malfunctioning "avoidance conditioning" test subjecting him to 76 electrical shocks. The Soviets designed their first human space capsule using the same spacecraft bus as their Zenit spy satellite , forcing them to keep the details and true appearance secret until after
48608-474: Was the first shuttle flight of that year, the first flight of a Russian cosmonaut , Sergei Krikalev , aboard the American shuttle, and marked the start of increased cooperation in space for the two nations, 37 years after the Space Race began. Part of an international agreement on human space flight, the mission was the second flight of the Spacehab pressurized module and marked the hundredth " Getaway Special " payload to fly in space. The primary payload for
48832-462: Was the oldest and heaviest of the fleet, it was not suited for efficient operations at Mir 's (and later the ISS's ) 51.6-degree inclination – Columbia was therefore not retrofitted with the necessary external airlock and Orbital Docking System, and never flew to a space station. Phase One of the Shuttle– Mir program began on February 3, 1994, with the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on its 18th mission, STS-60 . The eight-day mission
49056-416: Was the only one of the three major allied World War II powers to not have its own rocket program, until Von Braun and his engineers were expatriated from Nazi Germany in 1945. The US acquired a large number of V-2 rockets and recruited von Braun and most of his engineering team in Operation Paperclip . The team was sent to the Army's White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, in 1945. They set about assembling
49280-430: Was the third docking mission to Mir , which also demonstrated logistics capabilities through deployment of a Spacehab module, and placed experiment packages aboard Mir 's docking module, which marked the first spacewalk which occurred around docked vehicles. The spacewalks, carried out from Atlantis 's crew cabin, provided valuable experience for astronauts in order to prepare for later assembly missions to
49504-542: Was to remove electrical power connectors from a 12-year-old solar power array on the base block and reconnect the cables to the more efficient new solar power arrays. In all, Blaha spent four months with the Mir-22 cosmonaut crew conducting material science , fluid science , and life science research, before returning to Earth the next year aboard Atlantis on STS-81 . In 1997 STS-81 replaced Increment astronaut John Blaha with Jerry Linenger , after Blaha's 118-day stay aboard Mir . During this fifth shuttle docking,
49728-431: Was turned down by the Western powers. Some sources dispute the sincerity of the proposal. Britain, France, the United States, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). That August, the first Soviet atomic device was detonated in Semipalatinsk , Kazakh SSR . Following Soviet refusals to participate in
49952-434: Was weakened during the war against Japan . Meanwhile, the communists told different groups, such as the peasants, exactly what they wanted to hear, and they cloaked themselves under the cover of Chinese nationalism . Confronted with the communist revolution in China and the end of the American atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand its containment doctrine. In NSC 68 ,
50176-421: Was worried that a satellite passing above a nation at over 100 kilometers (62 mi) might be seen as violating that nation's airspace. He was concerned that the Soviet Union would accuse the Americans of an illegal overflight, thereby scoring a propaganda victory at his expense. Eisenhower and his advisors were of the opinion that a nation's airspace sovereignty did not extend past the Kármán line , and they used
#253746