Who won the space race?

Moscow’s scoreboard

Most histories run the race from Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, to a handshake in orbit on July 17, 1975. For the first eleven of those years, nearly every headline went one way:

• First satellite: Sputnik 1, October 4, 1957.
• First animal in orbit: the dog Laika, on Sputnik 2, November 3, 1957.
• First probe to reach the Moon, and first photos of its far side: Luna 2 and Luna 3, 1959.
• First human in space: Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1, April 12, 1961.
• First woman in space: Valentina Tereshkova, Vostok 6, June 16, 1963.
• First spacewalk: Alexei Leonov, Voskhod 2, March 18, 1965.
• First soft landing on the Moon: the robot probe Luna 9, February 3, 1966.
• First living things around the Moon and home: two tortoises on Zond 5, September 1968.

Most of those firsts came from the design bureau of Sergei Korolev, whose name was a state secret until he died in January 1966. The story of the first one is in What was Sputnik?, and the first flight of a person in Who was the first person in space?.

Washington’s scoreboard

The American firsts came later and made fewer front pages, but they were the skills a Moon landing would need. On December 15, 1965, Gemini 6 and Gemini 7 met in orbit and flew within a few meters of each other. On March 16, 1966, Neil Armstrong’s Gemini 8 made the first docking of two craft in space. At Christmas 1968 Apollo 8 carried the first crew around the Moon. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed, and five more crews walked on the surface through December 1972. Twelve men in all, every one an American.

The secret Soviet Moon program

Moscow did race for the Moon. In public, Khrushchev said it was “not at present planning” such a flight; in secret, a 1964 decree had ordered one, and Leonov was picked to be the first Soviet to walk there. The plan rested on a giant rocket, the N1. Four were launched between 1969 and 1972, and all four failed. The second blew up on its pad two weeks before Apollo 11. On July 21, 1969, while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface, the robot probe Luna 15 crashed in the Sea of Crises.

Moscow turned to robots instead. In September 1970 Luna 16 brought a small sample of Moon soil back to Earth on its own, and that November the Lunokhod 1 rover began driving across the lunar surface. For two decades the official line was that there had been no crewed race to lose. The program came to light only in 1989, in the years of glasnost.

How the race ended

Once Apollo had reached the Moon, Congress cut NASA’s budget and the last three planned landings were canceled. In a season of détente, Richard Nixon and Alexei Kosygin signed an agreement in Moscow on May 24, 1972, to fly together. On July 17, 1975, an Apollo docked with a Soyuz in orbit, and Leonov shook hands with Tom Stafford through the open hatch. Most histories end the race there.

So who won?

Those who say the Soviet Union won point to the scoreboard: it led for more than a decade and kept most of the firsts. Those who say the United States won point to the finish line Kennedy set in 1961, which only American crews crossed. Both sides buried people, both spent fortunes, and Apollo alone cost about 25 billion dollars of the time. What both left behind for everyone is a view of the Earth from far away, taken on Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve orbit.