Sixty years ago, the Soviet Union was way ahead of the USA in the space race. Then one critical event changed everything.
Not only in the United States, but all across the world, humanity celebrated 2024 as the 55th anniversary of the culmination of the Space Race: the quest to put a human being on the Moon and safely return them to Earth. On July 20, 1969, our species achieved a dream older than civilization itself, as human beings set foot on the surface of another world beyond Earth when they walked on the surface of the Moon, some 380,000 km away. From 1969 through 1972, a total of 12 American astronauts walked on the lunar surface, marking the first and only time to date that human beings have set foot on the solid surface of a world beyond our own planet.
If any nation was going to do it, most thought it was going to be the Soviet Union. The Soviets were first to every milestone in space before that:
- the first satellite,
- the first crewed spaceflight,
- the first person to orbit the Earth,
- the first woman in space,
- the first spacewalk,
- the first landers on another world,
