American History: The Space Race
28 September 2011
Astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin walks by the footpad of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module in July 1969
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember.
(SOUND: Radio signals from Sputnik)
On a cold October day in nineteen fifty-seven, the Soviet Union launched a small satellite into orbit around the Earth. Radio Moscow made the announcement.
RADIO MOSCOW: "The first artificial Earth satellite in the world has now been created. This first satellite was today successfully launched in the USSR."
The world's first satellite was called Sputnik 1. Sputnik was an important propaganda victory for the Soviets in the Cold War with the United States.
Many people believed the nation that controlled space could win any war. And the Soviet Union had reached outer space first.
(MUSIC)
The technology that launched Sputnik probably began in the late nineteenth century. A Russian teacher of that time, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, decided that a rocket engine could provide power for a space vehicle.
In the early nineteen hundreds, another teacher -- American Robert Goddard -- tested the idea. He experimented with small rockets to see how high and how far they could travel. In nineteen twenty-three, a Romanian student in Germany, Hermann Oberth, showed how a spaceship might be built and launched to other planets.
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