Did NASA win the space race?
If the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union were an athletic competition, it would look more like a decathlon than a linear 5K. Allowing each country to flex its Cold War muscles, the space race of the 1960s symbolized the power struggle between the United States and the USSR during that tenuous time after World War II . The first successful orbit of the Soviet’s artificial satellite Sputnik I on October 4, 1957 sent the United States into a galactic frenzy. Roughly the size of a watermelon, Sputnik was the starting pistol that launched the space race. In the struggle to catch up, U.S. President Eisenhower signed into creation the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958. From here, NASA and its astronauts would take center stage in the peacetime pursuit to beat the Soviet Unio
