Between 1957 and 1975, the Soviet Union and the United States raced each other into orbit and then to the Moon. The famous moments are here, usually with a twist: the first spaceman who parachuted home, an Earthrise photo credited to the wrong astronaut, a space dog's puppy at the White House. So are the people behind them, from a Chief Designer whose name was a state secret to the mathematician John Glenn trusted to check a computer.
Every tile in a The Space Race game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Astronauts and Cosmonauts
nine stories
1The first man in orbit did not land in his spaceship
On the tile: Yuri Gagarin1961
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, but he did not land inside his Vostok capsule. As planned, he ejected several miles up and came down by parachute. That was awkward, because the international body that certifies flight records required a pilot to land inside his craft. The Soviet paperwork left the detail out. When Gherman Titov admitted to ejecting four months later, the delegates met and decided that launch, orbit and safe return were what really counted.
Valentina Tereshkova went to work in a textile plant at sixteen and took up parachuting as a hobby in 1959. By 1961 she had jumped from more than 125 aircraft, experience that counted in her favor when she was chosen in 1962 as the first cosmonaut recruit who was not a test pilot. On June 16, 1963, she lifted off in Vostok 6 with the call sign Chaika, Russian for seagull. She orbited Earth 48 times in nearly three days, more time in space than all the American Mercury astronauts combined.
Alexei Leonov attended art school before he became a pilot, and on March 18, 1965, he made the first walk in space. Outside Voskhod 2 his suit ballooned in the vacuum, so he could not reach his own camera, and it was too bloated to fit back into the airlock. He bled off air until he could squeeze inside. He had also packed colored pencils, each on a thread so it would not float away, and sketched a sunrise from orbit, the first artwork made in space. He later painted some 200 space-themed pictures.
Gherman Titov trained as Yuri Gagarin's backup, shadowing his every preparation: woken in the same hut at Baikonur, the same breakfast, the same help into a pressure suit, the same ride to the launch pad. His own turn came on August 6, 1961, when Vostok 2 took him around the Earth more than 17 times and gave him the first full day anyone had spent in space. It also taught space medicine an unwelcome lesson: Titov suffered a bad case of what is now called space adaptation syndrome, and it worried the Soviets greatly.
America's first man in space had a surprise for the end of his Apollo 14 moonwalk in February 1971. Alan Shepard had brought a custom six-iron head, which he fixed to the handle of a lunar sample tool, and swung one-handed in his stiff suit. The first ball went into a crater. As the second sailed out of the TV camera's view he called out, "Miles and miles and miles." He later estimated about 200 yards. In 2021, image specialist Andy Saunders measured it from mission photos: about 40 yards.
In December 1965, as Gemini 6A prepared to come home, Tom Stafford radioed about an object going from north to south, probably in polar orbit and low enough to reenter soon. Then Wally Schirra played "Jingle Bells" on a Hohner harmonica while Stafford shook small sleigh bells. The idea was Schirra's. They had practiced two or three times before launch without telling the ground, and stowed the instruments on the cabin wall with dental floss and Velcro. The National Air and Space Museum, which holds them, calls it the first musical interlude from space.
Before Apollo 8 flew in 1968, its crew picked distinctive landmarks along possible landing routes, and Jim Lovell chose a peak on the edge of the Sea of Tranquility. He named it Mount Marilyn, for his wife, whom he had married in 1952. The name was practical as well as romantic: the mountain, about 1,400 meters tall, helped the Apollo 11 crew confirm that their descent was on course. For decades it stayed an informal nickname, until the International Astronomical Union made it official on July 26, 2017.
Back inside the lunar module after the first moonwalk, Buzz Aldrin spotted something on the floor: a circuit breaker switch that had snapped off the panel, probably knocked by a bulky backpack. It was the breaker that armed the ascent engine, the one that would lift him and Neil Armstrong off the Moon. The crew spent a fretful night, and by morning Houston still had no solution. So Aldrin took a felt-tip pen from his suit pocket and pushed it into the opening where the switch had been. The circuit held.
9The grounded astronaut who waited sixteen years to fly
On the tile: Deke Slayton1959-1975
Deke Slayton was one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, but on March 15, 1962, NASA announced that a heart irregularity would keep him off his orbital flight. He stayed on as coordinator of astronaut activities and later director of flight crew operations, assigning the crews for Gemini, Apollo and Skylab. Meanwhile he kept to a strict exercise and diet regimen, hoping the flight surgeons would relent. On March 13, 1972, they did, and in July 1975 he finally flew on Apollo-Soyuz. President Gerald Ford joked with him about being the world's oldest space rookie.
Sputnik 1, launched on October 4, 1957, was a polished aluminum sphere just 58 centimeters across, with four long whip antennas. Seen from the ground at night it was barely visible, a faint sixth-magnitude point that was hard to follow. Its rocket booster had also reached orbit, though, and that shone as a bright first-magnitude object. So the Sputnik that was easy to spot was really the rocket. Pravda even printed a timetable, like a train schedule, of when the carrier rocket would pass over cities including Detroit and Washington.
Vanguard 1, launched from Cape Canaveral on March 17, 1958, was an aluminum sphere only 16.5 centimeters across that weighed 1.46 kilograms. It was the first satellite to run on solar cells: six of them, each roughly 5 centimeters on a side, together making about one watt. Its solar-powered radio kept sending signals until May 1964. The satellite itself never came down. It is the oldest satellite still orbiting Earth, and estimates of its orbital lifetime have been cut from 2,000 years to about 240.
To put a person into orbit, Sergei Korolev's team took a spy satellite concept and replaced its camera payload with an ejection seat. The result was Vostok, a nearly spherical cabin with three small portholes. Space inside was so tight that the first crew choices were made partly on size: Yuri Gagarin stood 1.57 meters, about five feet two. Because of worries about how a human would react to weightlessness, the manual controls were locked before launch, and ground personnel controlled the entire flight.
Luna 3 launched on October 4, 1959, two years to the day after Sputnik 1, and became the first spacecraft to return images of the Moon's far side. It took 29 photographs covering about 70 percent of the hidden hemisphere. The film was then developed, fixed and dried aboard the probe, and a bright spot of light scanned each frame to turn it into radio signals. The first attempts were too weak, but by October 18 it had sent 17 noisy, readable pictures of mountainous terrain.
5Gus Grissom named his Gemini for an unsinkable lady
On the tile: Molly Brown1965
In 1961, Gus Grissom's Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7, sank after its hatch blew open early. So when he got to name Gemini 3, he chose Molly Brown, the unsinkable heroine of a Broadway hit. NASA's upper echelons thought the name lacked dignity. Then they learned his second choice was Titanic, and they grudgingly consented. On March 23, 1965, Molly Brown carried Grissom and John Young through three orbits. Officially it was Gemini 3; unofficially the name stuck.
Voskhod 1, launched on October 12, 1964, was the first spaceflight to carry more than one person. Its crew of three was chosen as a mix of specialists: Vladimir Komarov as command pilot, the physician Boris Yegorov and the scientist Konstantin Feoktistov. Part of the point was to see how a team from different disciplines would work together in orbit. The cabin's life support was judged reliable enough that the three men flew in overalls instead of cumbersome spacesuits and helmets. The flight also sent back live television pictures.
7The Soviet Moon rocket that fell back onto its pad
On the tile: N1 Rocket1967-1972
The N1 was the Soviet Moon rocket, comparable in size to the Saturn V. In late 1967 a U.S. reconnaissance satellite photographed one on its pad at Baikonur, which influenced Apollo decisions, though the picture could not show that it was only a mockup. The real flights went badly. The first, in February 1969, exploded downrange. On July 3, 1969, less than three weeks before Apollo 11 landed, the second shut down seconds after liftoff and fell back onto the pad, destroying it. A fourth test in 1972 also failed.
8The Moon rover that ran nearly four times as long
On the tile: Lunokhod 11970-1971
On November 17, 1970, the Soviet lander Luna 17 set down in the Moon's Sea of Rains carrying Lunokhod 1, a tub-shaped robot with a big lid and eight independently powered wheels, driven by remote control from Earth. It was designed to operate through three lunar days. It kept going for eleven. When operations officially ended on October 4, 1971, fourteen years to the day after Sputnik 1, it had traveled 10,540 meters, sent back more than 20,000 television pictures and tested the lunar soil more than 500 times.
The Lunar Roving Vehicle had to fold. Its aluminum chassis was hinged so it could hang in a bay of the lunar module, and astronauts lowered it with ropes, reels and pulleys while the wheels swung out and locked. Its tires were woven from zinc-coated steel strands, not rubber. The rover was developed in only 17 months, although Boeing's $19 million contract ended up costing $38 million. Rovers were driven on Apollo 15, 16 and 17, and the Apollo 17 crew covered 35.9 kilometers in theirs.
On August 19, 1960, the dogs Belka and Strelka rode Sputnik 5 into orbit with a rabbit, 40 mice, two rats and flasks of fruit flies, and came back alive. Strelka later had puppies. At a state dinner in Vienna in June 1961, Jacqueline Kennedy asked Nikita Khrushchev about them, and one soon arrived as a gift: Pushinka, meaning Fluffy. At the White House she learned to climb the ladder to Caroline Kennedy's playhouse and slide down the chute. When she had puppies of her own, President Kennedy called them the pupniks.
Three months before Alan Shepard flew, a chimpanzee called Number 65 rode a Mercury-Redstone rocket. His handlers nicknamed him Ham, after the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center in New Mexico, where he learned to pull levers in response to lights and sounds for banana pellets. On January 31, 1961, his capsule flew higher and farther than planned, reaching 157 miles, and it began taking on water after splashdown before the helicopter arrived. Ham came through slightly tired and dehydrated, and his reaction times in space were only slightly slower than on Earth.
3The heat shield alarm on America's first orbital flight
On the tile: Friendship 71962
On February 20, 1962, as John Glenn began his second orbit in Friendship 7, controllers saw a signal that his landing bag had deployed. If that were true, the heat shield he needed for reentry was no longer in place. Engineers suspected a false signal but came up with a plan anyway: keep the retrorocket pack strapped on after it fired, in the hope that its straps would hold the shield. During reentry, large burning pieces of the pack flew past Glenn's window. The shield stayed put, and Glenn splashed down safely.
Voskhod 2 is remembered for the first spacewalk in March 1965, but its return was an adventure too. The automatic system that was supposed to orient the spacecraft for its retrorocket burn malfunctioned, so Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov had to control the reentry manually. They came down in a pine forest far north of their target area. Finding the capsule was only the start. Rescuers had to cut a way through the forest, and the two cosmonauts were brought out on skis.
On March 16, 1966, Neil Armstrong and David Scott docked Gemini 8 with an Agena target vehicle, the first docking ever made in space. About 27 minutes later the joined spacecraft began to yaw and tumble. Armstrong undocked, but Gemini spun even faster, approaching one revolution per second. The crew shut down the maneuvering system and used the reentry thrusters to stop the spin. The cause was a thruster stuck firing. Having used reentry fuel, Gemini 8 had to come home at once, splashing down in the western Pacific.
In 1969, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman told Life magazine that he had talked Bill Anders into handing over the camera so he could photograph Earth rising over the Moon, and for years he was credited with the famous picture. Anders remembered it differently. In 1987, historian Andrew Chaikin got the onboard tapes and heard what happened: Anders spotted Earth rising, fired off a black-and-white frame, urgently asked Jim Lovell for color film and snapped two color pictures. Borman's line "Don't take that, it's not scheduled" was a joke about Anders's strict photo plan.
The oxygen tank that exploded on Apollo 13 in April 1970 had a hidden past. It was first installed in Apollo 10, and during its removal for modification it was dropped two inches. Before launch it would not empty properly, so workers ran its heater for eight hours on 65-volt ground power. The heater's thermostat switches, designed for 28 volts, had been overlooked in an upgrade and probably welded shut, badly damaging wire insulation. Fifty-six hours into the flight, a routine stir of the tank sparked the fire.
On July 13, 1969, three days before Apollo 11 launched, the Soviet Union sent Luna 15 toward the Moon. It was meant to collect a lunar sample and bring it back, and it is thought to have been a last-ditch effort to return a sample before the Americans. The probe caused much speculation at NASA. On July 21, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were still on the surface, Luna 15 struck the Moon at about 15:50 Universal Time. The Apollo 11 lunar module lifted off about two hours later.
Apollo 14 command module pilot Stuart Roosa had been a Forest Service smoke jumper, so the chief of the Forest Service asked him to take tree seeds into space. In February 1971, hundreds of loblolly pine, sycamore, sweetgum, redwood and Douglas fir seeds orbited the Moon in his personal kit. Back on Earth the bags burst during decontamination, and the seeds were feared ruined, but many grew. Most seedlings were given away in 1975 and 1976 for the nation's bicentennial, one to the White House. No complete list of where they went was ever kept.
The Soviet Union trumpeted Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin's flight and the first spacewalk, but it never named the man who directed them. Sergei Korolev was known only as the Chief Designer, and his identity was a state secret. His road there was brutal. Arrested in 1938 during Stalin's purges, he spent time in the Gulag and later worked as a prisoner in a design bureau. The Soviet people learned who he was only after he died during surgery in January 1966, when Pravda ran a two-page obituary.
2The mathematician John Glenn asked to check the computer
On the tile: K. Johnson1962
For John Glenn's 1962 orbital flight, IBM computers were loaded with the equations for Friendship 7's orbit, but the astronauts were wary of machines prone to hiccups and blackouts. As part of his preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to "get the girl" to run the same numbers by hand. That was Katherine Johnson, who had joined Langley's all-Black West Area Computing section in 1953 and had done trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard. She worked the equations on a desktop mechanical calculator, and Glenn flew. In 2015 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Margaret Hamilton led the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which built Apollo's guidance software. Working nights and weekends, she sometimes brought her young daughter, who once decided to play astronaut and pressed a simulator button that crashed the system. Hamilton wanted to protect the software against that slip, but was told astronauts were trained never to make a mistake. Then, during Apollo 8, Jim Lovell made the exact same error. Her team fixed it within hours, and later Apollo flights carried built-in protection.
The programs that guided Apollo to the Moon were stored in wire. In the guidance computer's core rope memory, a wire threaded through a tiny magnetic core read as a one, and a wire that bypassed the core read as a zero. Factory workers, usually women, encoded each bit by hand, and Raytheon built the ropes. Changing a sealed module meant rewiring it, so the software had to be delivered months before a mission, and it had to be right the first time.
A popular story says NASA spent millions inventing a pen that writes in space, while cosmonauts simply used pencils. In fact, astronauts and cosmonauts both started with pencils, whose tips could break off and float into electronics, and NASA drew an outcry after paying $128.89 apiece for mechanical pencils in 1965. Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company reportedly spent $1 million developing a pressurized pen, none of it NASA's money. NASA tested it and ordered 400 for Apollo, and cosmonauts have used it since 1969.
When NASA's Mission Control teams were formed, each took a color. Chris Kraft chose red, John Hodge chose blue, and Gene Kranz, the least senior, got white. Wanting to unite a team that might feel picked last, Kranz began wearing a white suit vest sewn by his wife, Marta. She also made festive vests for celebrating safe recoveries, one embroidered with gold and silver thread. Apollo 13 in 1970 left no chance to change, so his most famous vest is a plain white one, now at the National Air and Space Museum.
7The first close picture of Mars was colored by hand
On the tile: Mariner 41965
On July 14, 1965, Mariner 4 flew past Mars, snapping 22 photographs, the first close-range images of the planet. Employees in the Telecommunications Section at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were too anxious to wait for the official processed picture. A machine was printing the image data as numbers on strips of paper, so they attached the strips side by side to a display panel and colored in the numbers by hand, like a paint-by-numbers picture. The finished image was framed and presented to JPL director William Pickering.
Apollo reached the Moon by lunar orbit rendezvous: a mother ship stayed in orbit while a small lander went down and came back up to meet it. At first the idea met stiff opposition, and a competing plan called for a giant rocket to fly straight to the surface. Others at Langley studied the concept too, but engineer John Houbolt became its most vocal advocate, risking his reputation to argue for it. When NASA adopted it in 1962, his supervisor congratulated him on single-handedly saving the government $20 billion.
9Thirteen women passed the astronaut fitness tests
On the tile: Jerrie Cobb1960-1962
In 1960, award-winning pilot Jerrie Cobb became the first woman to pass the physical tests the Lovelace Foundation in Albuquerque had developed to select NASA's first astronauts. Nineteen women pilots took the privately funded tests, which included ice water shot into their ears, and thirteen passed. Advanced tests at the Navy's Pensacola school were canceled days before the women were due. Cobb took the case to Washington, and Congress held hearings in July 1962, but NASA required military jet test-pilot training that no woman could then have. No American woman flew in space until 1983.