The Space Race

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.