![]() ![]() Want to become the ultimate crossword puzzle-solver? Let us help you find answers to crossword puzzles with our online crossword-solver, whether you have a word on the tip of your tongue or just need one clue. It is, for director Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, “a feeling of reverence and a feeling of respect towards what is most fundamental, which is this planet”.How to Be an Expert Crossword Puzzle-Solver By exploring our tiny bit of the vast universe, those who venture out, and we who stay earthbound, gain a new perspective. Seeing our beautiful, fragile planet in the midst of dark, endless space contributed to the modern environmental movement and the first Earth Day. So too did astronaut William Anders’ stunning photograph Earth Rise, taken during the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. It is well-known that the technological innovations spurred by the space race have changed our world. Positive and profound consequences have also been overlooked. Musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 song Whitey on the Moon makes this point too. The Poor People’s Campaign organised a protest at Cape Canaveral the day before the Apollo 11 launch “Billion$ for space, pennies for the hungry’” read their placards. Prioritising funding for NASA’s race to the moon deprived domestic programmes confronting poverty and economic inequality. The focus on winning misses such collaborations as well as the costs of the race. That year the last Apollo mission docked with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft and the two commanders shook hands in space. Instead, perhaps 1975 is a better end to the space race. “We intend to win.” Based on these terms, when Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the surface of the moon in 1969, the United States did ‘win’. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” he explained, “and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” JFK issued this call just a month after Yuri Gagarin successful orbited the earth. Kennedy called for putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. If we define the ‘space race’ as spaceflight capability, the Soviets won it hands down.īut it was the Americans who got to define the space race for posterity when President John F. Still, the Soviets followed this ‘first’ with many more: first spacecraft moon landing (Luna 2, 1959), first man in space (Yuri Gagarin, 1961), first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova, 1963), and first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov, 1965). The very next year, the US established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). “Sputnik was a humiliating defeat for the United States -perhaps the darkest hour of the Cold War,” historian Philip Taubman argues. This first human-made satellite made one revolution every 90 minutes, and people around the globe tuned in to hear the beep-beep of the radio signal. The Cold War meant that Americans experienced a major crisis of confidence when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into earth orbit in 1957. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has written: “Scientific space endeavours aren’t separable from military ones, and they never were”. The Cold War rivals used their research to develop the capability of intercontinental ballistic missiles and spy satellites. The American and Soviet space programmes were never ‘pure science’. The space race was a test of the scientific research, technological ingenuity and economic resources of the two nations. The Cold War is a good place to start as it provided the context and catalyst for the US-Soviet space race. Who really won the US-Soviet space race is a historical question worth asking. But today this claim deserves another look, particularly given the American self-congratulation and boosterism accompanying the 50th anniversary. ![]() So in 1969, when American officials declared that the space race against the Soviet Union was ‘over’ and the US had ‘won’, few in the West challenged the claim. Without a doubt, landing a man on the moon was an incredible scientific, technical, and organisational achievement for the United States. This world famous, if not universally believed, event is being commemorated and celebrated around the world. A half a century since American astronaut Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, declaring, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” while his fellow crew member Buzz Aldrin snapped a photo. Tomorrow marks 50 years since the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. ![]()
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