On July 20, 1969, the world stopped dead in its tracks and changed forever. Humans had stepped foot on something besides the earth the moon. The United States had beaten every other country to the moon. It was a hard mission to achieve, because it takes a lot of people and time to land on the moon, a lot of bravery and money, and the United States did it first! Although the United States had indeed beaten Russia to the moon, the broader implications of the space race remained unclear.
The landing on the moon ended a thirteen year competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. In October 1957, the Soviet Union had created the first artificial earth satellite, named Sputnik. This began the race for space. Scientists and engineers from all over the world, such as the Russian Constantin Ziolokovsky, the German Hermann Oberth, the American Robert Goddard, and the Frenchman Robert Esnault-Pelterie, for the most part were jealous of one another's work, but had figured out many theoretical and mathematical foundations.
Buzz Aldrin walks on the moon, July 20, 1969
Aldrin poses on the Moon, allowing Armstrong to ph...
The Saturn V carrying Apollo 11 took several secon...They did this by means of high-powered rockets (Chaikin 201).
Small groups and organizations were forming during the 1920's and 1930's, so all the countries could compete in the "race". A few were the German "Society for Space Travel", The Britain Interplanetary Society, and the American Rocket Society. They were made to perform experiments with rockets and discuss space exploration, but unfortunately none of these programs had enough funds to conduct the experiments necessary to figure out the mysteries of space. At the end of the nineteen thirties, in most countries the research and experimenting of space was at a standstill. Germany was the only country to continue research because the military in the country was interested in the possibility of using rockets and had...