Space Race Summary: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo ~ 2000 NASA Film JSC-1030r

more at http://quickfound.net/

Moon race summary shows narrated historical film clips from NASA projects. Scenes include launches, on-orbit activities, and splashdowns.

Originally a public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Space Race refers to a competition that occured in the 20th century between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (US) as a part of the Cold War. The goal of the race was to achieve firsts in spaceflight capability, with origins in the ballistic missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations that occurred following World War II. The technological advantage required to rapidly achieve spaceflight milestones was seen as necessary for national security, and mixed with the symbolism and ideology of the time. The Space Race led to pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, uncrewed space probes of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon.

The competition began in earnest on August 2, 1955 when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviet Union achieved the first successful launch with the October 4, 1957 orbiting of Sputnik 1, and sent the first human to space with the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. The USSR also sent the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, to space on June 16, 1963, with numerous other firsts taking place over the next few years with regards to flight duration, spacewalks, and related activities. According to Russian sources, these achievements lead to the conclusion that the USSR had an advantage in space technology.

According to US sources, the "race" peaked with the July 20, 1969, US landing of the first humans on the Moon with Apollo 11. Most US sources will point to the Apollo 11 lunar landing as a singular achievement far outweighing any combination of Soviet achievements. In any case the USSR attempted several crewed lunar missions, but eventually canceled them and concentrated on Earth orbital space stations, while the US landed several more times on the Moon.

A period of détente followed with the April 1972 agreement on a co-operative Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew. The end of the Space Race is harder to pinpoint than its beginning, but it was over by the December 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, after which spaceflight cooperation between the US and Russia flourished.

The Space Race has left a legacy of Earth communications and weather satellites, and continuing human space presence on the International Space Station. It has also sparked increases in spending on education and research and development, which led to beneficial spin-off technologies...