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The Space Race was a competition between two Cold War adversaries, the Soviet Union and the United States, to achieve superior spaceflight capability in the twentieth century. It arose from the two countries' post-World War II nuclear arms race based on ballistic missiles. The technological advantage demonstrated by spaceflight achievement was viewed as necessary for national security, and it became part of the time's symbolism and ideology. The Space Race saw the launch of pioneering artificial satellites, robotic space probes to the Moon, Venus, and Mars, as well as human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and eventually to the Moon.
On July 30, 1955, the United States intended to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year. Four days later, the Soviet Union responded by announcing that it, too, would launch a satellite "in the near future." Developments in ballistic missile capabilities enabled the launching of satellites since the end of World War II. The "Sputnik crisis" drew Western public attention to the competition on October 4, 1957, when the USSR launched the first successful satellite, Sputnik 1. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union launched the first human into space, Yuri Gagarin, with the orbital flight of Vostok 1. These were followed by a slew of other firsts for the Soviets over the next few years.
Following Gagarin's flight, US President John F. Kennedy raised the stakes on May 25, 1961, by asking the US Congress to commit to the goal of "landing a man on the Moon and safely returning him to Earth" by the end of the decade. Both countries started working on super heavy-lift launch vehicles. The United States successfully launched the Saturn V, a large enough spacecraft to send a three-person orbiter and a two-person lander to the Moon. Kennedy's Moon landing goal was met in July 1969 with the flight of Apollo 11, a singular achievement regarded by Americans as dwarfing any combination of Soviet achievements. However, such an opinion is generally divisive, with others considering the first man in space to be a much larger accomplishment. The USSR pursued two crewed lunar programs but failed to launch and land on the Moon before the US, eventually canceling it to focus on Salyut, the first space station program and the first time landings on Venus and Mars. Meanwhile, the United States landed five more Apollo crews on the Moon and continued robotic exploration of other extraterrestrial bodies.
Following the April 1972 agreement on a cooperative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), a period of détente ensued, culminating in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew and the joint development of an international docking standard APAS-75. Given the Space Race's final act, competition would only gradually be replaced by cooperation. The Soviet Union's demise eventually allowed the United States and the newly formed Russian Federation to end their Cold War rivalry in space by agreeing in 1993 on the Shuttle-Mir and International Space Station programs.
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