The Penguin History of the World

Visions of space exploration could be found in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, when they were brought to the notice of the western public in fiction, notably, in the stories of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Its technology went back almost as far. A Soviet scientist, K. E. Tsiolkovsky, had designed multi-staged rockets and devised many of the basic principles of space travel (and he, too, had written fiction to popularize his obsession) well before 1914. The first Soviet liquid-fuelled rocket went up (3 miles) in 1933, and a two-stage rocket six years later. The Second World War prompted a major German rocket programme, which the United States had drawn on to begin its own programme in 1955.

The American programme started with more modest hardware than the Soviets’ (who already had a commanding lead) and the first American satellite weighed only 3 pounds (Sputnik I weighed 184 pounds). A much-publicized launch attempt was made at the end of December 1957, but the rocket caught fire instead of taking off. The Americans would soon do much better than this, but within a month of Sputnik I the Soviets had already put up Sputnik II, an astonishingly successful machine, weighing half a ton and carrying the first passenger in space, a black-and-white mongrel called Laika. For nearly six months Sputnik II orbited the earth, visible to the whole inhabited world and enraging thousands of dog-lovers, for Laika was not to return.

The Soviet and American space programmes had by then somewhat diverged. The Soviets, building on their pre-war experience, had put much emphasis on the power and size of their rockets, which could lift big loads, and here their strength continued to lie. The military implications were more obvious than those (equally profound but less spectacular) which flowed from American concentration on data-gathering and on instrumentation. A competition for prestige was soon underway, but although people spoke of a ‘space race’ the contestants were running towards somewhat different goals. With one great exception (the wish to be first to put a man in space) their technical decisions were probably not much influenced by one another’s performance. The contrast was clear enough when Vanguard, the American satellite that failed in December 1957, was successfully launched the following March. Tiny though it was, it went much deeper into space than any predecessor and provided more valuable scientific information in proportion to its size than any other satellite. It is likely to be in orbit for another couple of centuries or so.

New achievements then quickly followed. At the end of 1958 the first satellite for communications purposes was successfully launched (it was American). In 1960 the Americans scored another ‘first’ – the recovery of a capsule after re-entry. The Soviets followed this by orbiting and retrieving Sputnik V, a four-and-a-half-ton satellite, carrying two dogs that became the first living creatures to have entered space and returned to earth safely. In the spring of the following year, on 12 April, a Soviet rocket took off carrying a man, Yuri Gagarin. He landed 108 minutes later after one orbit around the earth. Humanity’s life in space had begun, four years after Sputnik I.

Possibly spurred by a wish to offset a recent publicity disaster in American relations with Cuba, President Kennedy proposed in May 1961 that the United States should try to land a man on the moon (the first man-made object had already crash-landed there in 1959) and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade. His publicly stated reasons for recommending this compare interestingly with those that led the rulers of fifteenth-century Portugal and Spain to back their Magellans and da Gamas. One was that such a project provided a good national goal; the next that it would be prestigious (‘impressive to mankind’ were the president’s words); the third was that it was of great importance for the exploration of space; and the fourth was (somewhat oddly) that it was of unparalleled difficulty and expense. Kennedy said nothing of the advancement of science, of commercial or military advantage – or, indeed, of what seems to have been his real motivation: to do it before the Soviets did. Surprisingly, the project met virtually no opposition and the first money was soon allocated.