Working Together

The Apollo triumph persuaded many people that the United States had won

the space race. No Soviets flew to the Moon, although unmanned Zond space­craft may have flown test flights for a Moon mission. Soviet plans for a Moon landing were abandoned, prob­ably because of serious problems with the rocket launcher and the lunar space­craft. The closest the Soviet Union came to the Moon was when two small robot vehicles crawled over the dusty lunar surface. Instead, the Soviets turned their attention to orbital space stations, such as Salyut 1 (1971) and later Mir. In 1975, on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, American and Soviet astronauts flew together in space. A new era of cooperation had begun.

By the 1980s, the space race was over. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improved, with the signing of treaties agreeing to bans on nuclear weapons testing and cut­backs in the production of missiles.

The United States introduced the Space Shuttle in 1981. Although they launched their Buran shuttle in 1988, the Soviets never seriously competed with the new, reusable spacecraft.

In 1989, the Soviet Union broke apart into separate countries. Since then, Russia has worked as a partner with the United States to build and operate the International Space Station. New partic­ipants in space include the European Space Agency (ESA) and China. (China became the third nation to launch an astronaut, in 2003.)

The space race provided significant technological spin-offs (especially in electronics) and led to an increase in sci­ence education. A future space race might be a commercial contest between companies offering space tourism, but most people believe that the future of scientific space exploration lies in inter­national cooperation rather than in a race for the stars.

SEE ALSO:

• Apollo Program • Astronaut

• Gagarin, Yuri • Glenn, John

• Spaceflight • Sputnik

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