What was the space race, and how did America reach the Moon?
Race to the Moon
What was the space race, and how did America reach the Moon?
For about fifteen years, two giant countries had a strange kind of contest. Not a war exactly, and not a game either — more like the world's most expensive game of "I bet I can go higher than you." The two players were the United States and the Soviet Union. The trophy? Space itself. People called it the Space Race.
The Soviet Union grabbed an early lead, and it was a doozy. In 1957 they launched Sputnik, a shiny metal ball about the size of a beach ball, and it went beep… beep… beep as it circled the Earth. It didn't do much. But the whole point was that it was up there at all — the first human-made object to orbit our planet. America heard that beeping and nearly spilled its coffee.
