The Space Race

1957–1969 CE — Global, United States / Soviet Union

Today: Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Baikonur, Kazakhstan

The Soviets got there first, repeatedly: Sputnik, the first satellite, in 1957; Yuri Gagarin, the first human in orbit, in 1961. The United States, humiliated, committed to landing on the Moon before the decade ended and spent about 4% of its federal budget doing it. In July 1969 Apollo 11 landed and roughly 600 million people watched. The rockets were built by the same engineering that built intercontinental missiles — the race was a way of demonstrating that capability without using it. What it left behind was less the Moon than the machinery of the modern world: satellites, integrated circuits, and the first photographs of the Earth entire.

Worth knowing: The computer that guided Apollo 11 to the Moon had roughly 4KB of usable memory — a rounding error against any modern phone, and its software was literally woven by hand, wire through magnetic rings, by women at a Massachusetts factory.

Pattern: Military-technological disruption — A weapon or tactic upends the prevailing balance of power and renders an old defensive or offensive order obsolete.

Entry 225 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.