Benefits Of The Space Race

In the 1960`s, during the cold war, the United States was still in the war of fighting communism. Soviets became known as the leaders of communism, and the last thing that the U.S. wanted was for the USSR to look superior to non-communist countries. Thus the Space Race was essentially a competition between the United States and the USSR to see who could make the most progression in space exploration to impress the world. This Space Race however, did cost both the United States and the Soviet Union a good deal of money, but the cost of the Space Race was worth the outcome and benefits. Perhaps one of the most significant motivations of the Space Race was to ultimately beat the Soviet Union (“McNamara”). Since the United States was so devoted to containing communism, any matter that could sway people away from communism was to the U.S. benefit. The United States did not only want to make the soviets look inferior, but the U.S. wanted security from any soviet intervention in space (“Kennedy”). After Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, the public was shocked, scared, and angry; many even thought that the U.S. was losing the war against
Explorer 1 was the beginning of the U.S. effort in space exploration. Also in 1958, NASA was created under order of President Eisenhower and was an agency devoted to space exploration. In May of 1961, JFK announced to the public that the United States would land on the moon before the end of the decade (“Space”). As NASA`s budget increased nearly 500 percent, the U.S. spent $23 billion on manned programs between 1961 and 1969. The Unites States spent $.4 billion on project Mercury, $1.3 billion on project Gemini, and nearly $10.1 billion on Apollo (“Race”). In 1967, in a space launch simulation, three astronauts were killed after the spacecraft caught fire (“Space”). In addition, the Space Race increased competition between the U.S. and the Soviets