The Human Space Race

Russia Takes the Initiative

After the embarrassment of being beaten into space by Russia, the American government were desperate to catch up and launch their own crafts into space; this was not going to be easy though, America’s first attempt to launch a satellite in December 1957 ended in disaster – Vanguard 1 came crashing back to earth in a ball of flames moments after its launch. The American’s failure was magnified by the fact that the whole planet watched the event on television transmissions; all the Russians attempts, failures and successes included, had been carried out in secret.

One of the people most annoyed at the American failure was Wernher von Braun, a German rocket scientist who surrendered to the Americans after World War II along with many of his team; von Braun had wanted to use one of his own teams ‘Jupiter C’ rockets but one of the US Navy’s ‘Vanguard’ rockets was used instead. Wernher von Braun was a rocket scientist for the Germans before the war ended, he had a great passion for, and an understanding of, rocket science and technology – the American’s snapped him up when the war ended and set him up in their own laboratories to work on missile technology, establishing a headquarters for his experiments in Huntsville, Alabama.

Wernher von Braun had warned the American government that the Russians must be pretty close to launching a satellite, but his words were ignored; he gained some credibility after his predictions were found to be true and, after the Vanguard failure for which it is thought he was excluded for political reasons, he became America’s number one rocket science consultant and headed all following major rocket projects after his success with the launch of the Jupiter C powered craft that sent a pencil-shaped cylinder called ‘Explorer 1’ full of scientific equipment into space. America’s first success in space flight distinguished itself by discovering a radiation belt around the Earth, which was later named after one of the Explorer 1 scientists – James Van Allen.

Though Earth’s extraterrestrial escapades had now become a two horse race the Russians were still in the lead for the time being; they launched the first craft to break free of Earth’s gravitational pull in January 1959, their Lunar 1 satellite went racing past the Moon. The Russians topped this later the same year in September with their Lunar 2 craft, which actually impacted upon the Moon’s surface – then again the following month the Lunar 3 flew right around the Moon, bringing back the first ever images of the Moon’s far side, which cannot be seen from Earth.

During this period of Russian success in space the Americans were suffering from a number of rather humiliating blunders and mishaps with their Pioneer spacecraft; they were designed to explore the Moon’s atmosphere but, in most cases, did not reach beyond Earth’s gravitational field, more than one of them exploded before getting into space. In March 1959 the Americans launched their Pioneer 4, which successfully flew past the Moon but missed it by 37,500 Earth miles (60,000 km). It was growing ever more obvious to the Humans by now that the race into space was concerned with greater exploits than firing unmanned probes at the Moon, knowing it could not be too long before Humans were journeying into space.

The Americans designed and built an experimental rocket powered airplane called the X-15 to fly to the edge of the atmosphere; the project was undertaken at the experimental test flight center at California’s Edwards Air Force Base. Though this sleek-looking plane would be unable to take a person into space, its designers were already thinking ahead to a craft that would; they had in mind a winged glider, the Dyna Soar, that could be launched from the top of a missile then glide back to earth and land like a regular airplane. The American president, Dwight Eisenhower, was eager to get things rolling a little quicker than current spacecraft designers were planning; though he was not an avid fan of a space programme, he did perceive a need to stay at least one step ahead of the Russians, and approved a plan to put a man into space via a scheme that came to be called Project Mercury, a civilian-lead space programme. The Mercury capsules differed from X-15 in that they were wingless and, instead of a sleek design, were shaped liked shallow cones. They were designed to be launched atop a guided missile then re-enter the Earth’s orbit, protected by a heat shield, and splash down in the ocean with the aid of parachutes.

The newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had selected seven pilots as the official Mercury crew by the last quarter of 1959, all of which hoped to be making history as the first space pilots. The Russians had 20 pilots with similar hopes training to be cosmonauts to fly their spacecraft, Vostok, that was being built by Sergei Korolev’s design bureau. At the outset of the 1960s, Earth’s two most powerful nations were struggling to be the first to achieve that which could only have been a wild fantasy only a few years earlier. As well as the engineering challenge of building a ship with the technological capability of reaching outer space and returning to Earth, the countries’ scientists had to figure out a way to keep the pilots alive in the vacuum of space, protect them from extreme temperatures and radiation – on top of everything else there was the effects of very high levels of g-force that would be put upon the pilots’ bodies on launching and returning to Earth; there were even doctors’ fears that their bodies would not function correctly in weightlessness, and fears of psychological damage that would render the pilots unable to handle the spacecraft properly.

There was also the fact that early Human rockets had a disconcerting habit of blowing up. All these factors were important considerations that forced the scientists and engineers working on the Mercury to move cautiously through their work; they did not use Humans for their initial flights, two of them had rhesus monkeys on board and two more flights had chimpanzees – some rode on the Redstone booster that would be used for early, sub-orbital Mercury tests, others rode on the Atlas ICBM that would later send Human pilots into orbit. Alan Shepard was selected as the first pilot for a Redstone-powered flight in the Spring of 1961 – Shepard was more than enthusiastic to get the job done but space flight official decided that one more test was needs, a decisions that set the Americans behind in the space race.

Vostok 1, the first Human-piloted Earth spacecraft in history, stood ready for launch atop another of Korolev’s Semyorka rockets on the morning of April 12, 1961 with Yuri Gagarin, the 27-year-old Russian pilot waiting inside Vostok’s spherical descent module, concealed inside an aerodynamic launch shroud – his mission: to make a single orbit of the planet Earth before landing safely on Russian soil.