"The Sputnik crisis was a period of public fear and anxiety in Western nations about the perceived technological gap between the United States and Soviet Union caused by the Soviets' launch of Sputnik 1. This created a crisis reaction in national newspapers such as the New York Times, which mentioned the satellite in 279 articles between October 6, 1957, and October 31, 1957 (more than 11 articles per day)."
11 articles per day
:michael-laugh:
TFW you have to start giving a shit about math and science education because the other superpower made you look like a fool.
It's wild how that wasn't the response when China basically ended COVID in China. Like that should have been a Sputnik moment for the US press. But I guess it's easier to just claim "they're lying" rather than actually pressuring the mechanics of our economic and political system to give a shit.
Eisenhower scrambling to institute emergency STEM programs because communist education is superior
The USSR even beat America to send the first black man in space, a Cuban named Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez. :fidel-salute-big: :sankara-salute:
and of course google lies about it when I search "first black person in space"
"Next goal wins guys! Oh, I scored? ... I have to go home now, my mom will kill me if I don't... we all agreed next goal wins, right?!"
Well of course America won, scientific innovation is impossible without capitalism.
On November 3rd of 1957, the Soviets sent Laika, a stray dog plucked from the streets of Moscow, into orbit around the Earth. Strapped into a small compartment on the tiny spacecraft Sputnik 2, Laika died during her fourth orbit when her capsule overheated.
The Americans responded with the same panic that met the launch of the first Sputnik. Eisenhower ordered the Naval Research Laboratory—which had been working separately for years on launching an artificial satellite into space—to immediately prepare a manned spaceflight. In January 1958, America finally responded to the Soviets’ scientific aggression by launching a Vanguard rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida containing two stray dogs.
These dogs died an icy death within an hour of leaving the atmosphere when their cabin depressurized. They were hailed as national heroes, and became a massive propaganda coup for NATO. Behind the iron curtain, VOA broadcasts let anyone with a radio know that capitalists were more efficient at killing dogs in space than communists.
Khrushchev was livid. He ordered his scientists to embark on what became known as the Luna program. On the second day of 1959, Luna 1 was launched towards the moon with 17 dogs from the streets of Vienna aboard, three of which were pregnant. The dogs all perished by the time the craft reached the Van Allen belt.
NASA, which had been created the previous summer, embarked on Project Mercury, which blasted a succession of angry cats into deep space with their tails tied together. The Soviets responded with the Vostok program, which sent horses into orbit strapped into medical devices that would periodically revive them so that a single horse could be killed, theoretically, dozens of times.
In the 1960s the space race turned to a new goal: to be the first nation to kill a dog on the moon.
The Americans suffered a massive setback in 1967 when a test of the Apollo 1 capsule resulted in three dogs dying in an electrical fire on Earth, not in space. But in 1969 the lunar module of Apollo 11 landed on the surface of the moon. Before a global audience of nearly 1 billion people, the door of the Eagle opened and the three dogs perished within minutes.
The Soviets had been bested, but in 1971 they achieved another scientific breakthrough when they established the Salyut 1 space station, which embodied man’s ultimate ambition of creating a self-contained environment in space where generations of dogs could be bred and killed.
After the fall of the USSR, a team of scientists from Russia, the US, and other countries—led by the American dog-killing wunderkind Pete Buttigieg—worked together to build the International Space Station. This year is the 22nd anniversary of the launch of the ISS, which to this day remains functioning in orbit—with a fully staffed kill shelter that only services pit bulls—as a monument not only to the science of space exploration, but to harmony among men on Earth.
This is kinda dumb. There was a legitimate "space race" between the two powers to specifically land a manned spacecraft on the moon.
...Did an American tell you that?
Seriously though - there was never any official/legitimate/specific "space race". Both countries celebrated their own successes as propaganda victories at the time. Then afterwards the US declared the moon to have been the goal and declared itself the winner in its own textbooks.
The USSR did shutter its own moon landing program after the US did it because the cost of doing it didn't justify itself - doing it second wasn't worth it and it was risky and expensive. So by that point the US had caught up and outpaced the USSR. But the idea that the moon landing was the ultimate achievement or that everyone agreed the US had "won" is post-hoc propaganda.
bad move on their part tbh, the 'muricans are always saying they're the only country to have landed on the moon.
There was a legitimate race for each of these achievements (except maybe Sputnik since the USSR caught them off guard) and for anything that could be spun as a propaganda victory. Americans think it was all about the moon landing because we only acknowledge the one that we won.
