title: Sam Houston

text: Houston sought the presidential nomination at the Know Nothing party's 1856 national convention, but the party nominated former President Millard Fillmore. Houston was disappointed by Fillmore's selection as well as the party platform, which did not rebuke the Kansas–Nebraska Act, but he eventually decided to support Fillmore's candidacy. Despite Houston's renewed support, the American Party split over slavery, and Democrat James Buchanan won the 1856 presidential election. The American Party collapsed after the election, and Houston did not affiliate with a national political party for the remainder of his tenure in the senate. In the 1857 Texas gubernatorial election, Texas Democrats nominated Hardin Richard Runnels, who supported the Kansas–Nebraska Act and attacked Houston's record. In response, Houston announced his own candidacy for governor, but Runnels defeated him by a decisive margin. It was the only electoral defeat of his career. After the gubernatorial election, the Texas legislature denied Houston re-election in the senate; Houston rejected calls to resign immediately and served until the end of his term in early 1859.


title: Sam Houston

text: Houston ran against Runnels in the 1859 gubernatorial election. Capitalizing on Runnels's unpopularity over state issues such as Native American raids, Houston won the election and took office in December 1859. In the 1860 presidential election, Houston and John Bell were the two major contenders for the presidential nomination of the newly formed Constitutional Union Party, which consisted largely of Southern unionists. Houston narrowly trailed Bell on the first ballot of the 1860 Constitutional Union Convention, but Bell clinched the nomination on the second ballot. Nonetheless, some of Houston's Texan supporters nominated him for president in April 1860. Other backers attempted to launch a nationwide campaign, but in August 1860, Houston announced that he would not be a candidate for president. He refused to endorse any of the remaining presidential candidates. In late 1860, Houston campaigned across his home state, calling on Texans to resist those who advocated for secession if Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election.


title: Sam Houston

text: After Lincoln won the November 1860 presidential election, several Southern states seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. A Texas political convention voted to secede from the United States on February 1, 1861, and Houston proclaimed that Texas was once again an independent republic, but he refused to recognize that same convention's authority to join Texas to the Confederacy. After Houston refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, the legislature declared the governorship vacant. Houston did not recognize the validity of his removal, but he did not attempt to use force to remain in office, and he refused aid from the federal government to prevent his removal. His successor, Edward Clark, was sworn in on March 18. In an undelivered speech, Houston wrote:


title: Sam Houston

text: After leaving office, Houston returned to his home in Galveston. He later settled in Huntsville, Texas, where he lived in a structure known as the Steamboat House. In the midst of the Civil War, Houston was shunned by many Texas leaders, though he continued to correspond with Confederate officer Ashbel Smith and Texas governor Francis Lubbock. His son, Sam Houston, Jr., served in the Confederate army during the Civil War, but returned home after being wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. Houston's health suffered a precipitous decline in April 1863, and he died on July 26, 1863, at 70 years of age.


title: Sam Houston

text: In January 1829 Houston, then Governor of Tennessee, married 19-year-old Eliza Allen. The marriage lasted 11 weeks. Neither Houston nor Eliza ever gave a reason for their separation, but Eliza refused to sanction divorce. Subsequently, he resigned his governorship and went to live with his Cherokee family for three years. In the summer of 1830, Houston married Tiana Rogers (sometimes called Diana), daughter of Chief John "Hellfire" Rogers (1740–1833), a Scots-Irish trader, and Jennie Due (1764–1806), a sister of Chief John Jolly, in a Cherokee ceremony. The ceremony was modest since it was Tiana's second marriage; she was widowed with two children from her previous marriage: Gabriel, born 1819, and Joanna, born 1822. She and Houston first met when she was ten years old, and he was stunned to see how beautiful she was when he returned to her village years later. The two lived together for several years. Tennessee society disapproved of the marriage because under civil law, he was still legally married to Eliza Allen Houston. After declining to accompany Houston to Texas in 1832, Tiana later remarried. She died in 1838 of pneumonia. Will Rogers was her nephew, three generations removed.


title: Sam Houston

text: In 1837, after becoming President of the Republic of Texas, he was able to acquire, from a district court judge, a divorce from Eliza Allen.


title: Sam Houston

text: In 1839, he purchased a horse which became one of the foundation sires of the American Quarter Horse breed named Copperbottom. He owned the horse until its death in 1860.


title: Sam Houston

text: On May 9, 1840, Houston, aged 47, married for a third time. His bride was 21-year-old Margaret Moffette Lea of Marion, Alabama, the daughter of planters. They had eight children. Margaret acted as a tempering influence on her much older husband and convinced him to stop drinking. Although the Houstons had numerous houses, they kept only one continuously: Cedar Point (1840–1863) on Trinity Bay.


title: Sam Houston

text: In 1833, Houston was baptized into the Catholic faith in order to qualify under the existing Mexican law for property ownership in Coahuila y Tejas. The sacrament was held in the living room of the Adolphus Sterne House in Nacogdoches, Texas. By 1854, Margaret had spent 14 years trying to convert Houston to the Baptist church. With the assistance of George Washington Baines, she convinced Houston to convert, and he agreed to adult baptism. Spectators from neighboring communities came to Independence, Texas, to witness the event. On November 19, 1854, Houston was baptized by Rev. Rufus C. Burleson, president of Baylor University, by immersion in Little Rocky Creek, two miles southeast of Independence.


title: Sam Houston

text: Houston was born on and inherited a slave plantation and mansion, and had many slaves throughout his life. While he did not enforce some anti-slavery measures, strong slavery laws were still in place under his leadership. He did not support the westward expansion of slavery. His attitude towards slavery was of pragmatism. He was a centrist who thought that both sides of the slavery debate were too extreme on the issue, and his greatest focus was not splitting up the Union. He thought states should decide for themselves on the issue of slavery.


title: Sam Houston

text: Houston, the largest city in Texas and the American South, is named in his honor. Several other things and places are named for Houston, including Sam Houston State University; Houston County, Minnesota; Houston County, Tennessee; Houston County, Texas. Other monuments and memorials include Sam Houston National Forest, Sam Houston Regional Library and Research Center, U.S. Army post Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, the USS "Sam Houston" (SSBN-609), and a sculpture of Houston in the city of Houston's Hermann Park. In addition, a 67-foot-tall statue of Houston, created by sculptor David Adickes, named "A Tribute to Courage" (and colloquially called "Big Sam") stands next to I-45, between Dallas and Houston, in Huntsville, Texas. Along with Stephen F. Austin, Houston is one of two Texans with a statue in the National Statuary Hall. Houston has been portrayed in works such as "Man of Conquest", "Gone to Texas", "Texas Rising", and "The Alamo". In 1960, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.


title: Sam Houston

text: There is a question about whether Houston made a pejorative comment about Mexicans in an 1835 speech to the Texas volunteer army at Refugio. One second hand source makes this claim; however, subsequent research casts doubt on the source and concludes that the disparaging comment is unlikely to have occurred.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: According to ancient and medieval science, aether (, alternative spellings include "æther", "aither", and "ether"), also known as the fifth element or quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere. The concept of aether was used in several theories to explain several natural phenomena, such as the traveling of light and gravity. In the late 19th century, physicists postulated that aether permeated all throughout space, providing a medium through which light could travel in a vacuum, but evidence for the presence of such a medium was not found in the Michelson–Morley experiment, and this result has been interpreted as meaning that no such luminiferous aether exists.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: The word ("aithḗr") in Homeric Greek means "pure, fresh air" or "clear sky". In Greek mythology, it was thought to be the pure essence that the gods breathed, filling the space where they lived, analogous to the "air" breathed by mortals. It is also personified as a deity, Aether, the son of Erebus and Nyx in traditional Greek mythology. Aether is related to "to incinerate", and intransitive "to burn, to shine" (related is the name "Aithiopes" (Ethiopians; see Aethiopia), meaning "people with a burnt (black) visage").


title: Aether (classical element)

text: In Plato's "Timaeus" (58d) speaking about air, Plato mentions that "there is the most translucent kind which is called by the name of aether (αἰθήρ)" but otherwise he adopted the classical system of four elements. Aristotle, who had been Plato's student at the Academy, agreed on this point with his former mentor, emphasizing additionally that fire has sometimes been mistaken for aether. However, in his Book "On the Heavens" he introduced a new "first" element to the system of the classical elements of Ionian philosophy. He noted that the four terrestrial classical elements were subject to change and naturally moved linearly. The first element however, located in the celestial regions and heavenly bodies, moved circularly and had none of the qualities the terrestrial classical elements had. It was neither hot nor cold, neither wet nor dry. With this addition the system of elements was extended to five and later commentators started referring to the new first one as the fifth and also called it "aether", a word that Aristotle had not used.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: Aether differed from the four terrestrial elements; it was incapable of motion of quality or motion of quantity. Aether was only capable of local motion. Aether naturally moved in circles, and had no contrary, or unnatural, motion. Aristotle also noted that celestial spheres made of aether held the stars and planets. The idea of aethereal spheres moving with natural circular motion led to Aristotle's explanation of the observed orbits of stars and planets in perfectly circular motion.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: Medieval scholastic philosophers granted "aether" changes of density, in which the bodies of the planets were considered to be more dense than the medium which filled the rest of the universe. Robert Fludd stated that the aether was "subtler than light". Fludd cites the 3rd-century view of Plotinus, concerning the aether as penetrative and non-material.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: Quintessence (𝓠) is the Latinate name of the fifth element used by medieval alchemists for a medium similar or identical to that thought to make up the heavenly bodies. It was noted that there was very little presence of quintessence within the terrestrial sphere. Due to the low presence of quintessence, earth could be affected by what takes place within the heavenly bodies. This theory was developed in the 14th century text "The testament of Lullius", attributed to Ramon Llull. The use of quintessence became popular within medieval alchemy. Quintessence stemmed from the medieval elemental system, which consisted of the four classical elements, and aether, or quintessence, in addition to two chemical elements representing metals: sulphur, "the stone which burns", which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: This elemental system spread rapidly throughout all of Europe and became popular with alchemists, especially in medicinal alchemy. Medicinal alchemy then sought to isolate quintessence and incorporate it within medicine and elixirs. Due to quintessence's pure and heavenly quality, it was thought that through consumption one may rid oneself of any impurities or illnesses. In "The book of Quintessence", a 15th-century English translation of a continental text, quintessence was used as a medicine for many of man's illnesses. A process given for the creation of quintessence is distillation of alcohol seven times. Over the years, the term quintessence has become synonymous with elixirs, medicinal alchemy, and the philosopher's stone itself.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: With the 18th century physics developments, physical models known as "aether theories" made use of a similar concept for the explanation of the propagation of electromagnetic and gravitational forces. As early as the 1670s, Newton used the idea of aether to help match observations to strict mechanical rules of his physics. The early modern aether had little in common with the aether of classical elements from which the name was borrowed. These aether theories are considered to be scientifically obsolete, as the development of special relativity showed that Maxwell's equations do not require the aether for the transmission of these forces. Einstein noted that his own model which replaced these theories could itself be thought of as an aether, as it implied that the empty space between objects had its own physical properties.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: Despite the early modern aether models being superseded by general relativity, occasionally some physicists have attempted to reintroduce the concept of aether in an attempt to address perceived deficiencies in current physical models. One proposed model of dark energy has been named "quintessence" by its proponents, in honor of the classical element. This idea relates to the hypothetical form of dark energy postulated as an explanation of observations of an accelerating universe. It has also been called a fifth fundamental force.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: The motion of light was a long-standing investigation in physics for hundreds of years before the 20th century. The use of aether to describe this motion was popular during the 17th and 18th centuries, including a theory proposed by Johann II Bernoulli, who was recognized in 1736 with the prize of the French Academy. In his theory, all space is permeated by aether containing "excessively small whirlpools". These whirlpools allow for aether to have a certain elasticity, transmitting vibrations from the corpuscular packets of light as they travel through.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: This theory of luminiferous aether would influence the wave theory of light proposed by Christiaan Huygens, in which light traveled in the form of longitudinal waves via an "omnipresent, perfectly elastic medium having zero density, called aether". At the time, it was thought that in order for light to travel through a vacuum, there must have been a medium filling the void through which it could propagate, as sound through air or ripples in a pool. Later, when it was proved that the nature of light wave is transverse instead of longitudinal, Huygens' theory was replaced by subsequent theories proposed by Maxwell, Einstein and de Broglie, which rejected the existence and necessity of aether to explain the various optical phenomena. These theories were supported by the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment in which evidence for the motion of aether was conclusively absent. The results of the experiment influenced many physicists of the time and contributed to the eventual development of Einstein's theory of special relativity.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: In 1682, Jakob Bernoulli formulated the theory that the hardness of the bodies depended on the pressure of the aether.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: Aether has been used in various gravitational theories as a medium to help explain gravitation and what causes it.


title: Aether (classical element)

text: A few years later, aether was used in one of Sir Isaac Newton's first published theories of gravitation, "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (the "Principia", 1687). He based the whole description of planetary motions on a theoretical law of dynamic interactions. He renounced standing attempts at accounting for this particular form of interaction between distant bodies by introducing a mechanism of propagation through an intervening medium. He calls this intervening medium aether. In his aether model, Newton describes aether as a medium that "flows" continually downward toward the Earth's surface and is partially absorbed and partially diffused. This "circulation" of aether is what he associated the force of gravity with to help explain the action of gravity in a non-mechanical fashion. This theory described different aether densities, creating an aether density gradient. His theory also explains that aether was dense within objects and rare without them. As particles of denser aether interacted with the rare aether they were attracted back to the dense aether much like cooling vapors of water are attracted back to each other to form water. In the "Principia" he attempts to explain the elasticity and movement of aether by relating aether to his static model of fluids. This elastic interaction is what caused the pull of gravity to take place, according to this early theory, and allowed an explanation for action at a distance instead of action through direct contact. Newton also explained this changing rarity and density of aether in his letter to Robert Boyle in 1679. He illustrated aether and its field around objects in this letter as well and used this as a way to inform Robert Boyle about his theory. Although Newton eventually changed his theory of gravitation to one involving force and the laws of motion, his starting point for the modern understanding and explanation of gravity came from his original aether model on gravitation.


title: Space Race

text: The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union, to achieve superior spaceflight capability. It had its origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations following World War II. The technological advantage demonstrated by spaceflight achievement was seen as necessary for national security, and became part of the symbolism and ideology of the time. The Space Race brought pioneering launches of artificial satellites, robotic space probes to the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and ultimately to the Moon.


title: Space Race

text: Public interest in space travel originated in the 1951 publication of a Soviet youth magazine and was promptly picked up by US magazines. The competition began on July 30, 1955 when the United States announced its intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year. Four days later, the Soviet Union responded by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The launching of satellites was enabled by developments in ballistic missile capabilities since the end of World War II. The competition gained Western public attention with the "Sputnik crisis", when the USSR achieved the first successful satellite launch, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957. It gained momentum when the USSR sent the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space with the orbital flight of Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. These were followed by a string of other early firsts achieved by the Soviets over the next few years.


title: Space Race

text: Gagarin's flight led US president John F. Kennedy to raise the stakes on May 25, 1961 by asking the US Congress to commit to the goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth" before the end of the decade. Both countries began developing super heavy-lift launch vehicles, with the US successfully deploying the Saturn V, which was large enough to send a three-person orbiter and two-person lander to the Moon. Kennedy's Moon landing goal was achieved in July 1969, with the flight of Apollo 11, a singular achievement Americans believed overshadowed all Soviet achievements. However, such an opinion is generally contentious, with others attributing the first man in space as being a much larger achievement. The USSR pursued two crewed lunar programs, but did not succeed with their N1 rocket to launch and land on the Moon before the US, and eventually canceled it to concentrate on Salyut, the first space station programme, and the first time landings on Venus and on Mars. Meanwhile, the US landed five more Apollo crews on the Moon and continued exploration of other extraterrestrial bodies robotically.


title: Space Race

text: A period of détente followed with the April 1972 agreement on a co-operative Apollo–Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew and joint development of an international docking standard APAS-75. Being considered as the final act of the Space Race, the competition would only gradually be replaced with cooperation. The collapse of the Soviet Union eventually allowed the US and the newly founded Russian Federation to end their Cold War competition also in space, by agreeing in 1993 on the Shuttle–"Mir" and International Space Station programs.


title: Space Race

text: Although Germans, Americans and Soviets experimented with small liquid-fuel rockets before World War II, launching satellites and humans into space required the development of larger ballistic missiles such as Wernher von Braun's Aggregat-4 (A-4), which became known as the Vergeltungswaffe 2 (V2) developed by Nazi Germany to bomb the Allies in the war. After the war, both the US and USSR acquired custody of German rocket development assets which they used to leverage the development of their own missiles.


title: Space Race

text: Public interest in space flight was first aroused in October 1951 when the Soviet rocketry engineer Mikhail Tikhonravov published "Flight to the Moon" in the newspaper "Pionerskaya pravda" for young readers. He described a two-person interplanetary spaceship of the future and the industrial and technological processes required to create it. He ended the short article with a clear forecast of the future: "We do not have long to wait. We can assume that the bold dream of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky will be realized within the next 10 to 15 years." From March 1952 to April 1954, the US Collier's magazine reacted with a series of seven articles Man Will Conquer Space Soon! detailing Wernher von Braun's plans for manned spaceflight. In March 1955, Disneyland's animated episode Man in Space in the US television with an audience of about 40 million people eventually fired the public enthusiasm for space travel and raised government interest, both in the USA and USSR.


title: Space Race

text: Soon after the end of World War II, the two former allies became engaged in a state of political conflict and military tension known as the Cold War (1947–1991), which polarized Europe between the Soviet Union's satellite states (often referred to as the Eastern Bloc) and the states of the Western world allied with the US.


title: Space Race

text: The first Soviet development of artillery rockets was in 1921 when the Soviet military sanctioned the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, a small research laboratory to explore solid fuel rockets, led by Nikolai Tikhomirov, who had begun studying solid and liquid-fueled rockets in 1894, and obtained a patent in 1915 for "self-propelled aerial and water-surface mines. The first test-firing of a solid fuel rocket was carried out in 1928.


title: Space Race

text: Further development was carried out in the 1930s by the Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD), where Soviet rocket pioneers Sergey Korolev, Friedrich Zander, Mikhail Tikhonravov and Leonid Dushkin launched GIRD-X, the first Soviet liquid-fueled rocket in 1933. In 1933 the two design bureaus were combined into the Reactive Scientific Research Institute and produced the


title: Space Race

text: RP-318, the USSR's first rocket-powered aircraft and the RS-82 and RS-132 missiles, which became the basis for the Katyusha multiple rocket launcher, During the 1930s Soviet rocket technology was comparable to Germany's, but Joseph Stalin's Great Purge from 1936 to 1938 severely damaged its progress.


title: Space Race

text: In 1944 the Soviets became aware of Nazi Germany's rocket program from Winston Churchill, which resulted in recovery of V-2 rocket parts from a missile test station in Debica, Poland. In early 1945 a team of Soviet rocket specialists were sent to Germany to identify and recover German rocket technology, which developed into Institute Rabe, a Soviet missile research group in Bleicherode, Germany that recruited and employed German rocket specialists to aid in current and future Soviet rocket development. In 1946 Operation Osoaviakhim moved more than 170 of the top German rocket specialists to the Soviet Union. In 1945 and 1946 the use of German expertise was invaluable in reducing the time needed to master the intricacies of the V-2 rocket, establishing production of the R-1 rocket and enable a base for further developments. However, after 1947 the Soviets made very little use of German specialists and their influence on the future Soviet rocket program was marginal. The Germans were eventually repatriated in 1951-53.


title: Space Race

text: Having suffered at least 27 million casualties during World War II after being invaded by Nazi Germany in 1941, the Soviet Union was wary of the United States, which until late 1949 was the sole possessor of atomic weapons. Since the Americans had a much larger air force than the Soviet Union, and the United States maintained advance air bases near Soviet territory, in 1947 Stalin ordered the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in order to counter the perceived American threat. In 1953, Korolev was given the go-ahead to develop the R-7 Semyorka rocket. It was successfully tested on August 21, 1957, and became the world's first fully operational ICBM the following month. It was later used to launch the first satellite into space, and derivatives launched all piloted Soviet spacecraft.


title: Space Race

text: Although American rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard developed, patented, and flew small liquid-propellant rockets as early as 1914, he became a recluse when his ideas were ridiculed by an editorial in "The New York Times". This left the United States as the only one of the major three World War II powers not to have its own rocket program, until Von Braun and his engineers were expatriated from Nazi Germany in 1945. The US acquired a large number of V2 rockets and recruited von Braun and most of his engineering team in Operation Paperclip. The team was sent to the Army's White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, in 1945. They set about assembling the captured V2s and began a program of launching them and instructing American engineers in their operation. These tests led to the first photos of Earth from space, and the first two-stage rocket, the WAC Corporal-V2 combination, in 1949. The German rocket team was moved from Fort Bliss to the Army's new Redstone Arsenal, located in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1950. From here, von Braun and his team developed the Army's first operational medium-range ballistic missile, the Redstone rocket, derivatives of which launched both America's first satellite, and the first piloted Mercury space missions. It became the basis for both the Jupiter and Saturn family of rockets.


title: Space Race

text: Each of the United States armed services had its own ICBM development program. The Air Force began ICBM research in 1945 with the MX-774. In 1950, von Braun began testing the Air Force PGM-11 Redstone rocket family at Cape Canaveral. By 1957, a descendant of the Air Force MX-774 received top-priority funding. and evolved into the Atlas-A, the first successful American ICBM. Its upgraded version, the Atlas-D, later served as a nuclear ICBM and as the orbital launch vehicle for Project Mercury and the remote-controlled Agena Target Vehicle used in Project Gemini.


title: Space Race

text: In 1955, with both the United States and the Soviet Union building ballistic missiles that could be used to launch objects into space, the stage was set for nationalistic competition. On July 29, 1955, James C. Hagerty, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's press secretary, announced that the United States intended to launch "small Earth circling satellites" between July 1, 1957, and December 31, 1958, as part of the US contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY). On August 2, at the Sixth Congress of the International Astronautical Federation in Copenhagen, scientist Leonid I. Sedov told international reporters at the Soviet embassy of his country's intention to launch a satellite as well, in the "near future".


title: Space Race

text: On August 30, 1955, Korolev managed to get the Soviet Academy of Sciences to create a commission whose purpose was to beat the Americans into Earth orbit: this was the "de facto" start date for the Space Race. The Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union began a policy of treating development of its space program as top-secret. When the Sputnik project was first approved, one of the immediate courses of action the Politburo took was to consider what to announce to the world regarding their event. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) established precedents for all official announcements on the Soviet space program. The information eventually released did not offer details on who built and launched the satellite or why it was launched. However, the public release is illuminating in what it does reveal: "there is an abundance of arcane scientific and technical data... as if to overwhelm the reader with mathematics in the absence of even a picture of the object".


title: Space Race

text: The Soviet space program's use of secrecy served as both a tool to prevent the leaking of classified information between countries, and also to create a mysterious barrier between the space program and the Soviet populace. The program's nature embodied ambiguous messages concerning its goals, successes, and values. The program itself was so secret that a regular Soviet citizen could never achieve a concrete image of it, but rather a superficial picture of its history, present activities, or future endeavors. Launchings were not announced until they took place. Cosmonaut names were not released until they flew. Mission details were sparse. Outside observers did not know the size or shape of their rockets or cabins or most of their spaceships, except for the first Sputniks, lunar probes, and Venus probe.


title: Space Race

text: The Soviet military maintained control over the space program; Korolev's OKB-1 design bureau was subordinated under the Ministry of General Machine Building, tasked with the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and continued to give its assets random identifiers into the 1960s. They cloaked the program in a shroud of secrecy; public pronouncements were uniformly positive. As far as the public knew, the Soviet space program had never experienced failure. According to historian James Andrews, "With almost no exceptions, coverage of Soviet space exploits, especially in the case of human space missions, omitted reports of failure or trouble".


title: Space Race

text: Dominic Phelan says in the book "Cold War Space Sleuths" (Springer-Praxis 2013): "The USSR was famously described by Winston Churchill as 'a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma' and nothing signified this more than the search for the truth behind its space program during the Cold War. Although the Space Race was literally played out above our heads, it was often obscured by a figurative 'space curtain' that took much effort to see through".


title: Space Race

text: Initially, President Eisenhower was worried that a satellite passing above a nation at over might be seen as violating that nation's airspace. He was concerned that the Soviet Union would accuse the Americans of an illegal overflight, thereby scoring a propaganda victory at his expense. Eisenhower and his advisors were of the opinion that a nation's airspace sovereignty did not extend past the Kármán line, and they used the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year launches to establish this principle in international law. Eisenhower also feared that he might cause an international incident and be called a "warmonger" if he were to use military missiles as launchers. Therefore, he selected the untried Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard rocket, which was a research-only rocket. This meant that von Braun's team was not allowed to put a satellite into orbit with their Jupiter-C rocket, because of its intended use as a future military vehicle. On September 20, 1956, von Braun and his team did launch a Jupiter-C that was capable of putting a satellite into orbit, but the launch was used only as a suborbital test of reentry vehicle technology.


title: Space Race

text: Korolev received word about von Braun's 1956 Jupiter-C test and, mistakenly thinking it was a satellite mission that failed, expedited plans to get his own satellite in orbit. Since the R-7 was substantially more powerful than any of the US launch vehicles, he made sure to take full advantage of this capability by designing Object D as his primary satellite. It was given the designation 'D', to distinguish it from other R-7 payload designations 'A', 'B', 'V', and 'G' which were nuclear weapon payloads. Object D dwarfed the proposed US satellites, having a weight of , of which would be composed of scientific instruments that would photograph the Earth, take readings on radiation levels, and check on the planet's magnetic field. However, things were not going along well with the design and manufacturing of the satellite, so in February 1957, Korolev sought and received permission from the Council of Ministers to build a "Prosteishy Sputnik" (PS-1), or simple satellite. The council also decreed that Object D be postponed until April 1958. The new "Sputnik" was a metallic sphere that would be a much lighter craft, weighing and having a diameter. The satellite would not contain the complex instrumentation that Object D had, but had two radio transmitters operating on different short wave radio frequencies, the ability to detect if a meteoroid were to penetrate its pressure hull, and the ability to detect the density of the Earth's thermosphere.


title: Space Race

text: Korolev was buoyed by the first successful launches of the R-7 rocket in August and September, which paved the way for the launch of "Sputnik". Word came that the US was planning to announce a major breakthrough at an International Geophysical Year conference at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C., with a paper titled "Satellite Over the Planet", on October 6, 1957. Korolev anticipated that von Braun might launch a Jupiter-C with a satellite payload on or around October 4 or 5, in conjunction with the paper. He hastened the launch, moving it to October 4. The launch vehicle for PS-1 was a modified R-7 – vehicle 8K71PS number M1-PS – without much of the test equipment and radio gear that was present in the previous launches. It arrived at the Soviet missile base Tyura-Tam in September and was prepared for its mission at launch site number one. The first launch took place on Friday, October 4, 1957 at exactly 10:28:34 pm Moscow time, with the R-7 and the now named Sputnik 1 satellite lifting off the launch pad and placing the artificial "moon" into an orbit a few minutes later. This "fellow traveler," as the name is translated in English, was a small, beeping ball, less than two feet in diameter and weighing less than 200 pounds. But the celebrations were muted at the launch control center until the down-range far east tracking station at Kamchatka received the first distinctive beep ... beep ... beep sounds from "Sputnik 1"s radio transmitters, indicating that it was on its way to completing its first orbit. About 95 minutes after launch, the satellite flew over its launch site, and its radio signals were picked up by the engineers and military personnel at Tyura-Tam: that's when Korolev and his team celebrated the first successful artificial satellite placed into Earth-orbit.


title: Space Race

text: At the latest the successful start of Sputnik 2 with its weight of more than 500 kg proved that the USSR had achieved a leading advantage in rocket technology. The dumbfounded CIA estimated the launch weight at 500 metric tons requiring an initial thrust of more than 1,000 ton and supposed the use of a three-stage rocket. In a secret report it concluded that ″the launching of two earth satellites must have been a stupendous scientific achievement. … Launching of these satellites does indicate, however, that the USSR has perfected an ICBM which they can put on any desired target with accuracy."


title: Space Race

text: The Soviet success raised a great deal of concern in the United States. For example, economist Bernard Baruch wrote in an open letter titled "The Lessons of Defeat" to the "New York Herald Tribune": "While we devote our industrial and technological power to producing new model automobiles and more gadgets, the Soviet Union is conquering space. ... It is Russia, not the United States, who has had the imagination to hitch its wagon to the stars and the skill to reach for the moon and all but grasp it. America is worried. It should be."


title: Space Race

text: Eisenhower ordered project Vanguard to move up its timetable and launch its satellite much sooner than originally planned. The December 6, 1957 Project Vanguard launch failure occurred at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It was a monumental failure, exploding a few seconds after launch, and it became an international joke. The satellite appeared in newspapers under the names Flopnik, Stayputnik, Kaputnik, and Dudnik. In the United Nations, the Soviet delegate offered the US representative aid "under the Soviet program of technical assistance to backwards nations." Only in the wake of this very public failure did von Braun's Redstone team get the go-ahead to launch their Jupiter-C rocket as soon as they could. In Britain, the US's Western Cold War ally, the reaction was mixed: some celebrated the fact that the Soviets had reached space first, while others feared the destructive potential that military uses of spacecraft might bring.


title: Space Race

text: On January 31, 1958, nearly four months after the launch of "Sputnik 1", von Braun and the United States successfully launched its first satellite on a four-stage Juno I rocket derived from the US Army's Redstone missile, at Cape Canaveral. The satellite "Explorer 1" was in mass. The payload of Explorer 1 weighed . It carried a micrometeorite gauge and a Geiger-Müller tube. It passed in and out of the Earth-encompassing radiation belt with its orbit, therefore saturating the tube's capacity and proving what Dr. James Van Allen, a space scientist at the University of Iowa, had theorized. The belt, named the Van Allen radiation belt, is a doughnut-shaped zone of high-level radiation intensity around the Earth above the magnetic equator. Van Allen was also the man who designed and built the satellite instrumentation of "Explorer 1". The satellite measured three phenomena: cosmic ray and radiation levels, the temperature in the spacecraft, and the frequency of collisions with micrometeorites. The satellite had no memory for data storage, therefore it had to transmit continuously. In March 1958 a second satellite was sent into orbit with augmented cosmic ray instruments.


title: Space Race

text: On April 2, 1958, President Eisenhower reacted to the Soviet space lead in launching the first satellite by recommending to the US Congress that a civilian agency be established to direct nonmilitary space activities. Congress, led by Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, responded by passing the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which Eisenhower signed into law on July 29, 1958. This law turned the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It also created a Civilian-Military Liaison Committee, appointed by the President, responsible for coordinating the nation's civilian and military space programs.


title: Space Race

text: On October 21, 1959, Eisenhower approved the transfer of the Army's remaining space-related activities to NASA. On July 1, 1960, the Redstone Arsenal became NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, with von Braun as its first director. Development of the Saturn rocket family, which when mature gave the US parity with the Soviets in terms of lifting capability, was thus transferred to NASA.


title: Space Race

text: In 1958, Korolev upgraded the R-7 to be able to launch a payload to the Moon. The Luna program began with three failed secret 1958 attempts to launch Luna E-1-class impactor probes. The fourth attempt, Luna 1, launched successfully on January 2, 1959, but missed the Moon. The fifth attempt on June 18 also failed at launch. The Luna 2 successfully impacted the Moon on September 14, 1959. The Luna 3 successfully flew by the Moon and sent back pictures of its far side on October 7, 1959. In total, the Luna program landed one successful impactor out of six attempts; one flyby out of three attempts; two soft landers out of 13 attempts; six orbiters out of eight attempts; two lunar rovers out of three attempts; and three sample returns out of 11 attempts.


title: Space Race

text: The US first embarked on the Pioneer program in 1958 by launching the first probe, albeit ending in failure. A subsequent probe named Pioneer 1 was launched with the intention of orbiting the Moon only to result in a partial mission success when it reached an apogee of 113,800 km before falling back to Earth. The missions of Pioneer 2 and Pioneer 3 failed whereas Pioneer 4 had one successful lunar flyby in March 1959.


title: Space Race

text: The Ranger program was started in 1959 by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Block I Ranger 1 and Ranger 2 suffered Atlas-Agena launch failures in August and November 1961. The Block II Ranger 3 launched successfully on January 26, 1962, but missed the Moon. The Ranger 4 became the first US spacecraft to reach the Moon, but its solar panels and navigational system failed near the Moon and it impacted the far side without returning any scientific data. Ranger 5 ran out of power and missed the Moon by on October 21, 1962. The first successful Ranger mission was the Block III Ranger 7 which impacted on July 31, 1964. Ranger had three successful impactors out of nine attempts.


title: Space Race

text: The Surveyor program had five successful soft landings out of seven attempts from 1966 to 1968. The Lunar Orbiter program had five successes out of five attempts in 1966–1967.


title: Space Race

text: The US and the USSR sent animals into space to determine the safety of the environment before sending the first humans. The USSR used dogs for this purpose, and the US used monkeys and apes. The first mammal in space was Albert II, a rhesus monkey launched by the US on a sub-orbital flight on June 14, 1949, who died on landing due to a parachute malfunction.


title: Space Race

text: The USSR sent the dog Laika into orbit on Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957 for an intended ten-day flight. They did not yet have the technology to return Laika safely to Earth, and the government reported Laika died when the oxygen ran out, but in October 2002 her true cause of death was reported as stress and overheating on the fourth orbit due to failure of the air conditioning system. At a Moscow press conference in 1998 Oleg Gazenko, a senior Soviet scientist involved in the project, stated "The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog...".


title: Space Race

text: On August 19, 1960, the dogs Belka and Strelka were sent into orbit aboard Sputnik 5 and safely returned.


title: Space Race

text: The Americans sent the chimpanzee Ham on a suborbital flight of the Mercury capsule on Mercury-Redstone 2 and recovered him safely on January 31, 1961.


title: Space Race

text: The chimpanzee Enos was launched on Mercury-Atlas 5 on November 29, 1961 into what was supposed to be a three-orbit flight. However, the mission was aborted after two orbits due to capsule overheating, and a malfunctioning "avoidance conditioning" test subjecting him to 76 electrical shocks.


title: Space Race

text: The Soviets designed their first human space capsule using the same spacecraft bus as their Zenit spy satellite, forcing them to keep the details and true appearance secret until after the Vostok program was over. The craft consisted of a spherical descent module with a mass of and a diameter of , with a cyllindrical inner cabin housing the cosmonaut, instruments, and escape system; and a biconic instrument module with a mass of , long and in diameter, containing the engine system and propellant. After reentry, the cosmonaut would eject at about over the USSR and descend via parachute, while the capsule would land separately, because the descent module made an extremely rough landing that could have left a cosmonaut seriously injured. The "Vostok spaceship" was first displayed at the July 1961 Tushino air show, mounted on its launch vehicle's third stage, with the nose cone in place concealing the spherical capsule. A tail section with eight fins was added in an apparent attempt to confuse western observers. This also appeared on official commemorative stamps and a documentary. The Soviets finally revealed the true appearance of their Vostok capsule at the April 1965 Moscow Economic Exhibition.


title: Space Race

text: On April 12, 1961, the USSR surprised the world by launching Yuri Gagarin into a single, 108-minute orbit around the Earth in a craft called Vostok 1. They dubbed Gagarin the first cosmonaut, roughly translated from Russian and Greek as "sailor of the universe". Gagarin's capsule was flown in automatic mode, since doctors did not know what would happen to a human in the weightlessness of space; but Gagarin was given an envelope containing the code that would unlock manual control in an emergency.


title: Space Race

text: Gagarin became a national hero of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and a worldwide celebrity. Moscow and other cities in the USSR held mass demonstrations, the scale of which was second only to the World War II Victory Parade of 1945. April 12 was declared Cosmonautics Day in the USSR, and is celebrated today in Russia as one of the official "Commemorative Dates of Russia." In 2011, it was declared the International Day of Human Space Flight by the United Nations.


title: Space Race

text: The USSR demonstrated 24-hour launch pad turnaround and launched two piloted spacecraft, Vostok 3 and Vostok 4, in essentially identical orbits, on August 11 and 12, 1962. The two spacecraft came within approximately of one another, close enough for radio communication, but then drifted as far apart as . The Vostok had no maneuvering rockets to keep the two craft a controlled distance apart. Vostok 4 also set a record of nearly four days in space. The first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, was launched into space on Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, as (possibly) a medical experiment. She was the only one to fly of a small group of female parachutist factory workers (unlike the male cosmonauts who were military test pilots), chosen by the head of cosmonaut training because he read a tabloid article about the "Mercury 13" group of women wanting to become astronauts, and got the mistaken idea that NASA was actually entertaining this. Five months after her flight, Tereshkova married Vostok 3 cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev, and they had a daughter.


title: Space Race

text: The US Air Force had been developing a program to launch the first man in space, named Man in Space Soonest. This program studied several different types of one-man space vehicles, settling on a ballistic re-entry capsule launched on a derivative Atlas missile, and selecting a group of nine candidate pilots. After NASA's creation, the program was transferred over to the civilian agency's Space Task Group and renamed Project Mercury on November 26, 1958. The Mercury spacecraft was designed by the STG's chief engineer Maxime Faget. NASA selected a new group of astronaut (from the Greek for "star sailor") candidates from Navy, Air Force and Marine test pilots, and narrowed this down to a group of seven for the program. Capsule design and astronaut training began immediately, working toward preliminary suborbital flights on the Redstone missile, followed by orbital flights on the Atlas. Each flight series would first start unpiloted, then carry a non-human primate, then finally humans.


title: Space Race

text: The Mercury spacecraft's principal designer was Maxime Faget, who started research for human spaceflight during the time of the NACA. It consisted of a conical capsule with a cyllindrical pack of three solid-fuel retro-rockets strapped over a beryllium or fiberglass heat shield on the blunt end. Base diameter at the blunt end was and length was ; with the launch escape system added, the overall length was . With of habitable volume, the capsule was just large enough for a single astronaut. The first suborbital spacecraft weighed ; the heaviest, Mercury-Atlas 9, weighed fully loaded. On reentry, the astronaut would stay in the craft through splashdown by parachute in the Atlantic Ocean.


title: Space Race

text: On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, launching in a ballistic trajectory on Mercury-Redstone 3, in a spacecraft he named "Freedom 7". Though he did not achieve orbit like Gagarin, he was the first person to exercise manual control over his spacecraft's attitude and retro-rocket firing. After his successful return, Shepard was celebrated as a national hero, honored with parades in Washington, New York and Los Angeles, and received the NASA Distinguished Service Medal from President John F. Kennedy.


title: Space Race

text: American Virgil "Gus" Grissom repeated Shepard's suborbital flight in "Liberty Bell 7" on July 21, 1961. Almost a year after the Soviet Union put a human into orbit, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, on February 20, 1962. His Mercury-Atlas 6 mission completed three orbits in the "Friendship 7" spacecraft, and splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean, after a tense reentry, due to what falsely appeared from the telemetry data to be a loose heat-shield. On February 23, 1962, President Kennedy awarded Glenn with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal in a ceremony at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. As the first American in orbit, Glenn became a national hero, and received a ticker-tape parade in New York City, reminiscent of that given for Charles Lindbergh.


title: Space Race

text: The United States launched three more Mercury flights after Glenn's: "Aurora 7" on May 24, 1962 duplicated Glenn's three orbits, "Sigma 7" on October 3, 1962 six orbits, and "Faith 7" on May 15, 1963 22 orbits (32.4 hours), the maximum capability of the spacecraft. NASA at first intended to launch one more mission, extending the spacecraft's endurance to three days, but since this would not beat the Soviet record, it was decided instead to concentrate on developing Project Gemini.


title: Space Race

text: Before Gagarin's flight, US President John F. Kennedy's support for America's piloted space program was lukewarm. Jerome Wiesner of MIT, who served as a science advisor to presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and himself an opponent of sending humans into space, remarked, "If Kennedy could have opted out of a big space program without hurting the country in his judgment, he would have." As late as March 1961, when NASA administrator James E. Webb submitted a budget request to fund a Moon landing before 1970, Kennedy rejected it because it was simply too expensive. Some were surprised by Kennedy's eventual support of NASA and the space program because of how often he had attacked the Eisenhower administration's inefficiency during the election.


title: Space Race

text: Gagarin's flight changed this; now Kennedy sensed the humiliation and fear on the part of the American public over the Soviet lead. Additionally, the Bay of Pigs invasion, planned before his term began but executed during it, was an embarrassment to his administration due to the colossal failure of the US forces. Looking for something to save political face, he sent a memo dated April 20, 1961, to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, asking him to look into the state of America's space program, and into programs that could offer NASA the opportunity to catch up. The two major options at the time were either the establishment of an Earth orbital space station or a crewed landing on the Moon. Johnson, in turn, consulted with von Braun, who answered Kennedy's questions based on his estimates of US and Soviet rocket lifting capability. Based on this, Johnson responded to Kennedy, concluding that much more was needed to reach a position of leadership, and recommending that the crewed Moon landing was far enough in the future that the US had a fighting chance to achieve it first.


title: Space Race

text: Kennedy ultimately decided to pursue what became the Apollo program, and on May 25 took the opportunity to ask for Congressional support in a Cold War speech titled "Special Message on Urgent National Needs".


title: Space Race

text: He justified the program in terms of its importance to national security, and its focus of the nation's energies on other scientific and social fields. He rallied popular support for the program in his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech, on September 12, 1962, before a large crowd at Rice University Stadium, in Houston, Texas, near the construction site of the new Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center facility.


title: Space Race

text: Khrushchev responded to Kennedy's challenge with silence, refusing to publicly confirm or deny the Soviets were pursuing a "Moon race". As later disclosed, the Soviet Union secretly pursued two competing crewed lunar programs. Soviet Decree 655–268, "On Work on the Exploration of the Moon and Mastery of Space", issued in August 1964, directed Vladimir Chelomei to develop a Moon flyby program with a projected first flight by the end of 1966, and directed Korolev to develop the Moon landing program with a first flight by the end of 1967. In September 1965, Chelomei's flyby program was assigned to Korolev, who redesigned the cislunar mission to use his own Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft and Chelomei's Proton rocket. After Korolev's death in January 1966, another government decree of February 1967 moved the first crewed flyby to mid-1967, and the first crewed landing to the end of 1968.


title: Space Race

text: After a first US-USSR Dryden-Blagonravov agreement and cooperation on the Echo II balloon satellite in 1962, President Kennedy proposed on September 20, 1963, in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, that the United States and the Soviet Union join forces in an effort to reach the Moon. Kennedy thus changed his mind regarding the desirability of the space race, preferring instead to ease tensions with the Soviet Union by cooperating on projects such as a joint lunar landing. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev initially rejected Kennedy's proposal. However, on October 2, 1997, it was reported that Khrushchev's son Sergei claimed Khrushchev was poised to accept Kennedy's proposal at the time of Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963. During the next few weeks he reportedly concluded that both nations might realize cost benefits and technological gains from a joint venture, and decided to accept Kennedy's offer based on a measure of rapport during their years as leaders of the world's two superpowers, but changed his mind and dropped the idea since he did not have the same trust for Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson.


title: Space Race

text: Some cooperation in robotic space exploration nevertheless did take place, such as a combined "Venera 4"–"Mariner 5" data analysis under a joint Soviet–American working group of COSPAR in 1969, allowing a more complete drawing of the profile of the atmosphere of Venus. Eventually the Apollo-Soyuz mission was realized afterall, which furthermore laid the foundations for the Shuttle-Mir program and the ISS.


title: Space Race

text: As President, Johnson steadfastly pursued the Gemini and Apollo programs, promoting them as Kennedy's legacy to the American public. One week after Kennedy's death, he issued renaming the Cape Canaveral and Apollo launch facilities after Kennedy.


title: Space Race

text: Focused by the commitment to a Moon landing, in January 1962 the US announced Project Gemini, a two-person spacecraft that would support the later three-person Apollo by developing the key spaceflight technologies of space rendezvous and docking of two craft, flight durations of sufficient length to go to the Moon and back, and extra-vehicular activity to perform work outside the spacecraft.


title: Space Race

text: Meanwhile, Korolev had planned further long-term missions for the Vostok spacecraft, and had four Vostoks in various stages of fabrication in late 1963 at his OKB-1 facilities. The Americans' announced plans for Gemini represented major advances over the Mercury and Vostok capsules, and Korolev felt the need to try to beat the Americans to many of these innovations. He had already begun designing the Vostok's replacement, the next-generation Soyuz, a multi-cosmonaut spacecraft that had at least the same capabilities as the Gemini spacecraft. Soyuz would not be available for at least three years, and it could not be called upon to deal with this new American challenge in 1964 or 1965. Political pressure in early 1964which some sources claim was from Khrushchev while other sources claim was from other Communist Party officialspushed him to modify his four remaining Vostoks to beat the Americans to new space firsts in the size of flight crews, and the duration of missions.


title: Space Race

text: Korolev's conversion of his surplus Vostok capsules to the Voskhod spacecraft allowed the Soviet space program to beat the Gemini program in achieving the first spaceflight with a multi-person crew, and the first "spacewalk". Gemini took a year longer than planned to make its first flight, so Voskhod 1 became the first spaceflight with a three-person crew on October 12, 1964. The USSR touted another "technological achievement" during this mission: it was the first space flight during which cosmonauts performed in a shirt-sleeve-environment. However, flying without spacesuits was not due to safety improvements in the Soviet spacecraft's environmental systems; rather this was because the craft's limited cabin space did not allow for spacesuits. Flying without spacesuits exposed the cosmonauts to significant risk in the event of potentially fatal cabin depressurization. This was not repeated until the US Apollo Command Module flew in 1968; the command module cabin was designed to transport three astronauts in a low pressure, pure oxygen shirt-sleeve environment while in space.


title: Space Race

text: On March 18, 1965, about a week before the first piloted Project Gemini space flight, the USSR launched the two-cosmonaut Voskhod 2 mission with Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov. Voskhod 2's design modifications included the addition of an inflatable airlock to allow for extravehicular activity (EVA), also known as a spacewalk, while keeping the cabin pressurized so that the capsule's electronics would not overheat. Leonov performed the first-ever EVA as part of the mission. A fatality was narrowly avoided when Leonov's spacesuit expanded in the vacuum of space, preventing him from re-entering the airlock. In order to overcome this, he had to partially depressurize his spacesuit to a potentially dangerous level. He succeeded in safely re-entering the spacecraft, but he and Belyayev faced further challenges when the spacecraft's atmospheric controls flooded the cabin with 45% pure oxygen, which had to be lowered to acceptable levels before re-entry. The reentry involved two more challenges: an improperly timed retrorocket firing caused the Voskhod 2 to land off its designated target area, the city of Perm; and the instrument compartment's failure to detach from the descent apparatus caused the spacecraft to become unstable during reentry.


title: Space Race

text: By October 16, 1964, Leonid Brezhnev and a small cadre of high-ranking Communist Party officials deposed Khrushchev as Soviet government leader a day after Voskhod 1 landed, in what was called the "Wednesday conspiracy".


title: Space Race

text: The new political leaders, along with Korolev, ended the technologically troublesome Voskhod program, cancelling Voskhod 3 and 4, which were in the planning stages, and started concentrating on reaching the Moon. Voskhod 2 ended up being Korolev's final achievement before his death on January 14, 1966, as it became the last of the space firsts that the USSR achieved during the early 1960s. According to historian Asif Siddiqi, Korolev's accomplishments marked "the absolute zenith of the Soviet space program, one never, ever attained since." There was a two-year pause in Soviet piloted space flights while Voskhod's replacement, the Soyuz spacecraft, was designed and developed.


title: Space Race

text: Though delayed a year to reach its first flight, Gemini was able to take advantage of the USSR's two-year hiatus after Voskhod, which enabled the US to catch up and surpass the previous Soviet superiority in piloted spaceflight. Gemini had ten crewed missions between March 1965 and November 1966: Gemini 3, Gemini 4, Gemini 5, Gemini 6A, Gemini 7, Gemini 8, Gemini 9A, Gemini 10, Gemini 11, and Gemini 12; and accomplished the following:


title: Space Race

text: Gemini 8 experienced the first in-space mission abort on March 17, 1966, just after achieving the world's first docking, when a stuck or shorted thruster sent the craft into an uncontrolled spin. Command pilot Neil Armstrong was able to shut off the stuck thruster and stop the spin by using the re-entry control system. He and his crewmate David Scott landed and were recovered safely.


title: Space Race

text: Most of the novice pilots on the early missions would command the later missions. In this way, Project Gemini built up spaceflight experience for the pool of astronauts for the Apollo lunar missions. With the completion of Gemini, the US had demonstrated all the technologies necessary to make Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the Moon, with the exception of developing a large enough launch vehicle.


title: Space Race

text: Korolev's design bureau produced two prospectuses for circumlunar spaceflight (March 1962 and May 1963), the main spacecraft for which were early versions of his Soyuz design. Soviet Communist Party Central Committee Command 655-268 officially established two secret, competing crewed programs for circumlunar flights and lunar landings, on August 3, 1964. The circumlunar flights were planned to occur in 1967, and the landings to start in 1968.


title: Space Race

text: The circumlunar program (Zond), created by Vladimir Chelomey's design bureau OKB-52, was to fly two cosmonauts in a stripped-down Soyuz 7K-L1, launched by Chelomey's Proton UR-500 rocket. The Zond sacrificed habitable cabin volume for equipment, by omitting the Soyuz orbital module. Chelomey gained favor with Khrushchev by employing members of his family.


title: Space Race

text: Korolev's lunar landing program was designated N1/L3, for its N1 super rocket and a more advanced Soyuz 7K-L3 spacecraft, also known as the lunar orbital module (""Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl"", LOK), with a crew of two. A separate lunar lander (""Lunniy Korabl"", LK), would carry a single cosmonaut to the lunar surface.


title: Space Race

text: The N1/L3 launch vehicle had three stages to Earth orbit, a fourth stage for Earth departure, and a fifth stage for lunar landing assist. The combined space vehicle was roughly the same height and takeoff mass as the three-stage US Apollo-Saturn V and exceeded its takeoff thrust by 28% (45,400 kN vs. 33,000 kN), but had only about half the translunar injection payload capability. The Saturn V used liquid hydrogen fuel in its two upper stages, and carried a payload to the Moon, enough for a three-person orbiter and two-person lander. The USSR did not use liquid hydrogen until after the N-1 was canceled, therefore it was only capable of a translunar payload.


title: Space Race

text: The US and USSR began discussions on the peaceful uses of space as early as 1958, presenting issues for debate to the United Nations, which created a Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 1959.


title: Space Race

text: On May 10, 1962, Vice President Johnson addressed the Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space revealing that the United States and the USSR both supported a resolution passed by the Political Committee of the UN General Assembly in December 1962, which not only urged member nations to "extend the rules of international law to outer space," but to also cooperate in its exploration. Following the passing of this resolution, Kennedy commenced his communications proposing a cooperative American and Soviet space program.


title: Space Race

text: The UN ultimately created a "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", which was signed by the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom on January 27, 1967, and came into force the following October 10.


title: Space Race

text: In 1967, both nations' space programs faced serious challenges that brought them to temporary halts. Both had been rushing at full-speed toward the first piloted flights of Apollo and Soyuz, without paying due diligence to growing design and manufacturing problems. The results proved fatal to both pioneering crews.


title: Space Race

text: On January 27, 1967, the same day the US and USSR signed the Outer Space Treaty, the crew of the first crewed Apollo mission, Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White, and Pilot Roger Chaffee, were killed in a fire that swept through their spacecraft cabin during a ground test, less than a month before the planned February 21 launch. An investigative board determined the fire was probably caused by an electrical spark and quickly grew out of control, fed by the spacecraft's atmosphere of pure oxygen at greater than one standard atmosphere. Crew escape was made impossible by inability to open the plug door hatch cover against the internal pressure. The board also found design and construction flaws in the spacecraft, and procedural failings, including failure to appreciate the hazard of the pure-oxygen atmosphere, as well as inadequate safety procedures. All these flaws had to be corrected over the next twenty-two months until the first piloted flight could be made.


title: Space Race

text: Mercury and Gemini veteran Grissom had been a favored choice of Deke Slayton, NASA's Director of Flight Crew Operations, to make the first piloted landing.


title: Space Race

text: On April 24, 1967, the single pilot of Soyuz 1, Vladimir Komarov, became the first in-flight spaceflight fatality. The mission was planned to be a three-day test, to include the first Soviet docking with an unpiloted Soyuz 2, but the mission was plagued with problems. Early on, Komarov's craft lacked sufficient electrical power because only one of two solar panels had deployed. Then the automatic attitude control system began malfunctioning and eventually failed completely, resulting in the craft spinning wildly. Komarov was able to stop the spin with the manual system, which was only partially effective. The flight controllers aborted his mission after only one day. During the emergency re-entry, a fault in the landing parachute system caused the primary chute to fail, and the reserve chute became tangled with the drogue chute, causing descent speed to reach as high as 40 m/s (140 km/h; 89 mph). Shortly thereafter, Soyuz 1 impacted the ground 3 km (1.9 mi) west of Karabutak, exploding into a ball of flames. The official autopsy states Komarov died of blunt force trauma on impact, and that the subsequent heat mutilation of his corpse was a result of the explosive impact. Fixing the spacecraft's faults caused an eighteen-month delay before piloted Soyuz flights could resume.


title: Space Race

text: The United States recovered from the Apollo 1 fire, fixing the fatal flaws in an improved version of the Block II command module. The US proceeded with unpiloted test launches of the Saturn V launch vehicle (Apollo 4 and Apollo 6) and the Lunar Module (Apollo 5) during the latter half of 1967 and early 1968. The first Saturn V flight was an unqualified success, and although the second suffered some non-catastrophic engine failures, it was considered a partial success and the launcher achieved human rating qualification. Apollo 1's mission to check out the Apollo Command and Service Module in Earth orbit was accomplished by Grissom's backup crew on Apollo 7, launched on October 11, 1968. The eleven-day mission was a total success, as the spacecraft performed a virtually flawless mission, paving the way for the United States to continue with its lunar mission schedule.


title: Space Race

text: The Soviet Union also fixed the parachute and control problems with Soyuz, and the next piloted mission Soyuz 3 was launched on October 26, 1968. The goal was to complete Komarov's rendezvous and docking mission with the un-piloted Soyuz 2. Ground controllers brought the two craft to within of each other, then cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy took control. He got within of his target, but was unable to dock before expending 90 percent of his maneuvering fuel, due to a piloting error that put his spacecraft into the wrong orientation and forced Soyuz 2 to automatically turn away from his approaching craft. The first docking of Soviet spacecraft was finally realized in January 1969 by the Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 missions. It was the first-ever docking of two crewed spacecraft, and the first transfer of crew from one space vehicle to another.


title: Space Race

text: The Soviet Zond spacecraft was not yet ready for piloted circumlunar missions in 1968, after six unsuccessful automated test launches: Kosmos 146 on March 10, 1967; Kosmos 154 on April 8, 1967; Zond 1967A on September 28, 1967; Zond 1967B on November 22, 1967; Zond 1968A on April 23, 1968; and Zond 1968B in July 1968. Zond 4 was launched on March 2, 1968, and successfully made a circumlunar flight, but encountered problems with its Earth reentry on March 9, and was ordered destroyed by an explosive charge over the Gulf of Guinea. The Soviet official announcement said that Zond 4 was an automated test flight which ended with its intentional destruction, due to its recovery trajectory positioning it over the Atlantic Ocean instead of over the USSR.


title: Space Race

text: During the summer of 1968, the Apollo program hit another snag: the first pilot-rated Lunar Module (LM) was not ready for orbital tests in time for a December 1968 launch. NASA planners overcame this challenge by changing the mission flight order, delaying the first LM flight until March 1969, and sending Apollo 8 into lunar orbit without the LM in December. This mission was in part motivated by intelligence rumors the Soviet Union might be ready for a piloted Zond flight during late 1968. In September 1968, Zond 5 made a circumlunar flight with tortoises on board and returned safely to Earth, accomplishing the first successful water landing of the Soviet space program in the Indian Ocean. It also scared NASA planners, as it took them several days to figure out that it was only an automated flight, not piloted, because voice recordings were transmitted from the craft en route to the Moon. On November 10, 1968, another automated test flight, Zond 6, was launched. It encountered difficulties in Earth reentry, and depressurized and deployed its parachute too early, causing it to crash-land only from where it had been launched six days earlier. It turned out there was no chance of a piloted Soviet circumlunar flight during 1968, due to the unreliability of the Zonds.


title: Space Race

text: On December 21, 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to ride the Saturn V rocket into space, on Apollo 8. They also became the first to leave low-Earth orbit and go to another celestial body, entering lunar orbit on December 24. They made ten orbits in twenty hours, and transmitted one of the most watched TV broadcasts in history, with their Christmas Eve program from lunar orbit, which concluded with a reading from the biblical Book of Genesis. Two and a half hours after the broadcast, they fired their engine to perform the first trans-Earth injection to leave lunar orbit and return to the Earth. Apollo 8 safely landed in the Pacific Ocean on December 27, in NASA's first dawn splashdown and recovery.


title: Space Race

text: The American Lunar Module was finally ready for a successful piloted test flight in low Earth orbit on Apollo 9 in March 1969. The next mission, Apollo 10, conducted a "dress rehearsal" for the first landing in May 1969, flying the LM in lunar orbit as close as above the surface, the point where the powered descent to the surface would begin. With the LM proven to work well, the next step was to attempt the landing.


title: Space Race

text: Unknown to the Americans, the Soviet Moon program was in deep trouble. After two successive launch failures of the N1 rocket in 1969, Soviet plans for a piloted landing suffered delay. The launch pad explosion of the N-1 on July 3, 1969, was a significant setback. The rocket hit the pad after an engine shutdown, destroying itself and the launch facility. Without the N-1 rocket, the USSR could not send a large enough payload to the Moon to land a human and return him safely.


title: Space Race

text: Apollo 11 was prepared with the goal of a July landing in the Sea of Tranquility. The crew, selected in January 1969, consisted of commander (CDR) Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot (CMP) Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. They trained for the mission until just before the launch day. On July 16, 1969, at 9:32 am EDT, the Saturn V rocket, AS-506, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39 in Florida.


title: Space Race

text: The trip to the Moon took just over three days. After achieving orbit, Armstrong and Aldrin transferred into the Lunar Module named "Eagle", leaving Collins in the Command and Service Module "Columbia", and began their descent. Despite the interruption of alarms from an overloaded computer caused by an antenna switch left in the wrong position, Armstrong took over manual flight control at about to correct a slight downrange guidance error, and set the "Eagle" down on a safe landing spot at 20:18:04 UTC, July 20, 1969 (3:17:04 pm CDT). Six hours later, at 02:56 UTC, July 21 (9:56 pm CDT July 20), Armstrong left the "Eagle" to become the first human to set foot on the Moon.


title: Space Race

text: The first step was witnessed on live television by at least one-fifth of the population of Earth, or about 723 million people. His first words when he stepped off the LM's landing footpad were, "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind." Aldrin joined him on the surface almost 20 minutes later. Altogether, they spent just under two and one-quarter hours outside their craft. The next day, they performed the first launch from another celestial body, and rendezvoused back with Collins in "Columbia".


title: Space Race

text: Apollo 11 left lunar orbit and returned to Earth, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969. When the spacecraft splashed down, 2,982 days had passed since Kennedy's commitment to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth before the end of the decade; the mission was completed with 161 days to spare. With the safe completion of the Apollo 11 mission, the Americans won the race to the Moon.


title: Space Race

text: Armstrong and his crew became worldwide celebrities, feted with ticker-tape parades on August 13 in New York City and Chicago, attended by an estimated six million. That evening in Los Angeles they were honored at an official state dinner attended by members of Congress, 44 governors, the Chief Justice of the United States, and ambassadors from 83 nations. The President and Vice president presented each astronaut with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The astronauts spoke before a joint session of Congress on September 16, 1969. This began a 38-day world tour to 22 foreign countries and included visits with the leaders of many countries.


title: Space Race

text: The first landing was followed by another, precision landing on Apollo 12 in November 1969, within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 spacecraft which landed on April 20, 1967.


title: Space Race

text: NASA had ambitious follow-on human spaceflight plans as it reached its lunar goal, but soon discovered it had expended most of its political capital to do so. A victim of its own success, Apollo had achieved its first landing goal with enough spacecraft and Saturn V launchers left for a total of ten lunar landings through Apollo 20, conducting extended-duration missions and transporting the landing crews in Lunar Roving Vehicles on the last five. NASA also planned an Apollo Applications Program (AAP) to develop a longer-duration Earth orbital workshop (later named "Skylab") from a spent S-IVB upper stage, to be constructed in orbit using several launches of the smaller Saturn IB launch vehicle.


title: Space Race

text: In February 1969, President Richard M. Nixon convened a "space task group" to set recommendations for the future US civilian space program, headed by his Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Agnew was an enthusiastic proponent of NASA's follow-on plans for permanent space stations in Earth and lunar orbit, perhaps a base on the lunar surface, and the first human flight to Mars as early as 1986 or as late as 2000. These would be serviced by an infrastructure of a reusable Space Transportation System including an Earth-to-orbit Space Shuttle. Nixon had a better sense of the declining political support in Congress for new Apollo-style programs, which had disappeared with the achievement of the landing, and he intended to pursue détente with the USSR and China, which he hoped might ease Cold War tensions. He cut the spending proposal he sent to Congress to include funding for only the Space Shuttle, with perhaps an option to pursue the Earth orbital space station for the foreseeable future.


title: Space Race

text: AAP planners decided the Earth orbital workshop could be accomplished more efficiently by pre-fabricating it on the ground and launching it with a single Saturn V, which immediately eliminated Apollo 20. Budget cuts soon led NASA to cut Apollo 18 and 19 as well. Apollo 13 had to abort its lunar landing in April 1970 due to an in-flight spacecraft failure, but returned its crew safely to Earth. The Apollo program made its final lunar landing in December 1972; the two unused Saturn Vs were used as outdoor visitor displays and allowed to deteriorate due to the effects of weathering.


title: Space Race

text: The USSR continued trying to develop their N1 rocket, after two more launch failures in 1971 and 1972, finally canceling it in May 1974, without achieving a single successful uncrewed test flight.


title: Space Race

text: Having lost the race to the Moon, the USSR decided to concentrate on orbital space stations. During 1969 and 1970, they launched six more Soyuz flights after Soyuz 3, then launched a series of six successful space stations (plus two failures to achieve orbit, and one station rendered uninhabitable due to damage from explosion of the launcher's upper stage) on their Proton-K heavy-lift launcher in their Salyut program designed by Kerim Kerimov. Each one weighed between , was long by in diameter, and had a habitable volume of . All of the Salyuts were presented to the public as non-military scientific laboratories, but three of them were covers for military Almaz reconnaissance stations: Salyut 2 (failed), Salyut 3, and Salyut 5.


title: Space Race

text: Salyut 1, the first space station, was launched by the Soviets on April 19, 1971. Three days later, the Soyuz 10 crew attempted to dock with it, but failed to achieve a secure enough connection to safely enter the station. The Soyuz 11 crew of Vladislav Volkov, Georgi Dobrovolski and Viktor Patsayev successfully docked on June 7, and completed a record 22-day stay. The crew became the second in-flight space fatality during their reentry on June 30. They were asphyxiated when their spacecraft's cabin lost all pressure, shortly after undocking. The disaster was blamed on a faulty cabin pressure valve, that allowed all the air to vent into space. The crew was not wearing pressure suits and had no chance of survival once the leak occurred.


title: Space Race

text: The United States launched a single orbital workstation "Skylab" on May 14, 1973. It weighed , was long by in diameter, and had a habitable volume of . "Skylab" was damaged during the ascent to orbit, losing one of its solar panels and a meteoroid thermal shield. Subsequent crewed missions repaired the station, and the third and final mission's crew, Skylab 4, set a human endurance record (at the time) with 84 days in orbit when the mission ended on February 8, 1974. "Skylab" stayed in orbit another five years before reentering the Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia on July 11, 1979.


title: Space Race

text: Salyut 4 broke "Skylab"'s occupation record at 92 days. Salyut 6 and Salyut 7 were second-generation stations designed for long duration, and were occupied for 683 and 816 days.


title: Space Race

text: In May 1972, President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev negotiated an easing of relations known as détente, creating a temporary "thaw" in the Cold War. The two nations planned a joint mission to dock the last US Apollo craft with a Soyuz, known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). To prepare, the US designed a docking module for the Apollo that was compatible with the Soviet docking system, which allowed any of their craft to dock with any other (e.g. Soyuz-to-Soyuz as well as Soyuz-to-Salyut). The module was also necessary as an airlock to allow the men to visit each other's craft, which had incompatible cabin atmospheres. The USSR used the Soyuz 16 mission in December 1974 to test modifications of the Soyuz atmosphere and the docking adapter to prepare for ASTP.


title: Space Race

text: The joint mission began when Soyuz 19 was first launched on July 15, 1975, at 12:20 UTC, and the Apollo craft was launched with the docking module six and a half hours later. The two craft rendezvoused and docked on July 17 at 16:19 UTC. The three astronauts conducted joint experiments with the two cosmonauts, and the crew shook hands, exchanged gifts, and visited each other's craft.


title: Space Race

text: NASA achieved the first approach and landing test of its Space Shuttle orbiter on a Boeing 747 carrier plane on August 12, 1977, and the first orbital test flight of a complete, crewed Space Shuttle, consisting of the orbiter, an external fuel tank, and two solid rocket boosters, on April 12, 1981. The designers underestimated the time and cost of refurbishment between flights, which reduced the cost benefit of its reusability. They also overestimated its safety: two of the fleet of five orbiters were lost in fatal flight accidents: one during launch, due to failure of a solid rocket booster seal; and one on reentry, due to launch damage of a wing heat shield. The Air Force was also supposed to use the Shuttle to launch its military payloads, but shunned it in favor of its expendable launchers after the first Shuttle loss. NASA ceased production of its Apollo spacecraft and Saturn IB launcher, and used the Shuttle as its orbital workhorse until 2011, then retired it due to the safety concern. Originally, more than 150 flights over a 15-year operation were expected; actually, the Shuttle made 135 flights in its 30-year lifespan.


title: Space Race

text: The Soviets mistook the Shuttle as a military surveillance vehicle, and decided they had to develop their own shuttle which they named Buran, beginning in 1974. They copied the aerodynamic design of NASA's Shuttle orbiter, which they strapped to the side of their expendable, liquid hydrogen-fueled Energia launcher. The Buran could be fitted with four Saturn AL-31 turbofan engines and a fuel tank in its payload bay, allowing it to make its own atmospheric test flights, which began in November 1985. Also unlike the US Shuttle, it could be flown pilotlessly and landed automatically. Energia-Buran made only one orbital test flight in November 1988, but US counterintelligence baited the Soviets with disinformation about the heat shield design, and it was not reusable for repeated flight. Buran was the largest and most expensive Soviet program in the history of the Space Race, and was effectively canceled by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, due to lack of funding. The Energia was also canceled at the same time, after only two flights.


title: Space Race

text: The first woman in space was from the Soviet Union, Valentina Tereshkova. NASA did not welcome women astronauts into its corps until 1978, when six female mission specialists were recruited. This first class included scientist Sally Ride, who became America's first woman in space on STS-7 in June 1983. NASA included women mission specialists in the next four astronaut candidate classes, and admitted female pilots starting in 1990. Eileen Collins from this class became the first pilot to fly on Space Shuttle flight STS-63 in February 1995, and the first female commander of a spaceflight on STS-93 in July 1999.


title: Space Race

text: The USSR admitted its first female test pilot as a cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, in 1980. She became the first female to fly since Tereshkova, on Salyut 7 in December 1981.


title: Space Race

text: The USSR turned its space program to development of the low Earth orbit modular space station "Mir" ("peace" or "world") assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996. At , it held records for the largest spacecraft and the longest continuous human presence in space at 3,644 days, until the International Space Station was built starting in 1998. "Mir"'s operation continued after the 1991 replacement of the USSR's space program with the Russian Federal Space Agency until 2001, supported by Soyuz spacecraft.


title: Space Race

text: After the end of the Cold War in 1991, the assets of the USSR's space program passed mainly to Russia. Since then, the United States and Russia have cooperated in space with the Shuttle-"Mir" Program, and the International Space Station (ISS).


title: Space Race

text: The Russians continue to use their R-7 rocket family as their orbital workhorse to launch the Soyuz crewed spacecraft and its Progress derivative uncrewed cargo craft as shuttles to the ISS. After the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle, American crews were dependent on the R-7–Soyuz to reach the ISS, until the 2020 first flight of the US Crew Dragon Commercial Crew Development vehicle.


title: Neoconservatism

text: Neoconservatism is a political movement that began in the United States during the 1960s among liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the increasingly pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party and with the growing New Left and counterculture of the 1960s, particularly the Vietnam protests. Some also began to question their liberal beliefs regarding domestic policies such as the Great Society. Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, including peace through strength, and are known for espousing disdain for communism and political radicalism.


title: Neoconservatism

text: Prominent neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer. While not identifying as neoconservatives, senior officials Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld listened closely to neoconservative advisers regarding foreign policy, especially the defense of Israel and the promotion of American influence in the Middle East. Many of its adherents became politically influential during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, peaking in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.


title: Neoconservatism

text: Critics of neoconservatism have used the term to describe foreign policy and war hawks who support aggressive militarism or neo-imperialism. Historically speaking, the term "neoconservative" refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist left to the camp of American conservatism during the 1960s and 1970s. The movement had its intellectual roots in the magazine "Commentary", edited by Norman Podhoretz. They spoke out against the New Left and in that way helped define the movement.


title: Neoconservatism

text: The term "neoconservative" was popularized in the United States during 1973 by the socialist leader Michael Harrington, who used the term to define Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Irving Kristol, whose ideologies differed from Harrington's.


title: Neoconservatism

text: The "neoconservative" label was used by Irving Kristol in his 1979 article "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed 'Neoconservative'". His ideas have been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited the magazine "Encounter".


title: Neoconservatism

text: Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of the magazine "Commentary", from 1960 to 1995. By 1982, Podhoretz was terming himself a neoconservative in "The New York Times Magazine" article titled "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy".


title: Neoconservatism

text: During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the neoconservatives considered that liberalism had failed and "no longer knew what it was talking about", according to E. J. Dionne.


title: Neoconservatism

text: Seymour Lipset asserts that the term "neoconservative" was used originally by socialists to criticize the politics of the Social Democrats, USA association. Jonah Goldberg argues that the term is ideological criticism against proponents of modern American liberalism who had become slightly more conservative (both Lipset and Goldberg are frequently described as neoconservatives). In a book-length study for Harvard University Press, historian Justin Vaisse writes that Lipset and Goldberg are in error, as "neoconservative" was used by socialist Michael Harrington to describe three men – noted above – who were not in SDUSA, and neoconservatism is a definable political movement.


title: Neoconservatism

text: The term "neoconservative" was the subject of increased media coverage during the presidency of George W. Bush, with particular emphasis on a perceived neoconservative influence on American foreign policy, as part of the Bush Doctrine.


title: Neoconservatism

text: Through the 1950s and early 1960s, the future neoconservatives had endorsed the civil rights movement, racial integration and Martin Luther King Jr. From the 1950s to the 1960s, liberals generally endorsed military action in order to prevent a communist victory in Vietnam.


title: Neoconservatism

text: Neoconservatism was initiated by the repudiation of the Cold War and the "New Politics" of the American New Left, which Norman Podhoretz said was too sympathetic to the counterculture and too alienated from the majority of the population; and "anti-anticommunism", which included substantial endorsement of Marxist–Leninist politics during the late 1960s. Many neoconservatives were particularly alarmed by what they believed were the antisemitic sentiments of Black Power advocates. Irving Kristol edited the journal "The Public Interest" (1965–2005), featuring economists and political scientists, which emphasized ways that government planning in the liberal state had produced unintended harmful consequences. Many early neoconservative political figures were disillusioned Democratic politicians and intellectuals, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration. Many left-wing academics such as Frank Meyer and James Burnham eventually became associated with the conservative movement at this time.


title: Neoconservatism

text: A substantial number of neoconservatives were originally moderate socialists who were originally associated with the moderate wing of the Socialist Party of America (SP) and its successor party, Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Max Shachtman, a former Trotskyist theorist who developed a strong feeling of antipathy towards the New Left, had numerous devotees among SDUSA with strong links to George Meany's AFL-CIO. Following Shachtman and Meany, this faction led the SP to oppose immediate withdrawal from the Vietnam War, and oppose George McGovern in the Democratic primary race and, to some extent, the general election. They also chose to cease their own party-building and concentrated on working within the Democratic Party, eventually influencing it through the Democratic Leadership Council. Thus the Socialist Party dissolved in 1972, and SDUSA emerged that year. (Most of the left-wing of the party, led by Michael Harrington, immediately abandoned SDUSA.) SDUSA leaders associated with neoconservatism include Carl Gershman, Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik and Bayard Rustin.


title: Neoconservatism

text: Norman Podhoretz's magazine "Commentary", originally a journal of liberalism, became a major publication for neoconservatives during the 1970s. "Commentary" published an article by Jeane Kirkpatrick, an early and prototypical neoconservative, albeit not a New Yorker.


title: Neoconservatism

text: As the policies of the New Left made the Democrats increasingly leftist, these intellectuals became disillusioned with President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society domestic programs. The influential 1970 bestseller "The Real Majority" by Ben Wattenberg expressed that the "real majority" of the electorate endorsed economic interventionism, but also social conservatism; and warned Democrats it could be disastrous to adopt liberal positions on certain social and crime issues.


title: Neoconservatism

text: The neoconservatives rejected the countercultural New Left and what they considered anti-Americanism in the non-interventionism of the activism against the Vietnam War. After the anti-war faction took control of the party during 1972 and nominated George McGovern, the Democrats among them endorsed Washington Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson instead for his unsuccessful 1972 and 1976 campaigns for president. Among those who worked for Jackson were incipient neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle. During the late 1970s, neoconservatives tended to endorse Ronald Reagan, the Republican who promised to confront Soviet expansionism. Neoconservatives organized in the American Enterprise Institute and The Heritage Foundation to counter the liberal establishment. Author Keith Preston named the successful effort on behalf of neoconservatives such as George Will and Irving Kristol to cancel Reagan's 1980 nomination of Mel Bradford, a Southern Paleoconservative academic whose regionalist focus and writings about Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction alienated the more cosmopolitan and progress-oriented neoconservatives, to the leadership of the National Endowment for the Humanities in favor of longtime Democrat William Bennett as emblematic of the neoconservative movement establishing hegemony over mainstream American conservatism.


title: Neoconservatism

text: C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973), although there are several writers who claim that in doing so they may draw upon meaning that Strauss himself did not endorse. Eugene Sheppard notes: "Much scholarship tends to understand Strauss as an inspirational founder of American neoconservatism". Strauss was a refugee from Nazi Germany who taught at the New School for Social Research in New York (1938–1948) and the University of Chicago (1949–1969).


title: Neoconservatism

text: Strauss asserted that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose". His solution was a restoration of the vital ideas and faith that in the past had sustained the moral purpose of the West. The Greek classics (classical republican and modern republican), political philosophy and the Judeo-Christian heritage are the essentials of the Great Tradition in Strauss's work. Strauss emphasized the spirit of the Greek classics and Thomas G. West (1991) argues that for Strauss the American Founding Fathers were correct in their understanding of the classics in their principles of justice.