In 1947, the Cold War began, which – if you haven’t been educated about it thus far – was a period of strong tension between the Soviet Union and the United States that lasted upwards of 40 years, finally ending in 1991.
One of the best things to come out of the Cold War was the Space Race, the head-to-head competition between the Soviet Union, also known as the USSR, and the United States. Each of them wanted to prove to the other that its spaceflight capabilities were significantly better than the other.
The first competitor to successfully launch a satellite, Sputnik 1, that orbited the Earth was the Soviet Union, completing the task on Oct. 4, 1957.
The Soviet Union was also the first country on planet Earth to send a living human to the lower orbit of Earth’s gravitational field and successfully brought the cosmonaut back to Earth on April 12, 1961. The cosmonaut’s – cosmonaut is simply the Russian term for astronaut, though they mean the same thing – name was Yuri Gagarin.
The excitement in the Space Race peaked in the middle of 1969, specifically on July 20, 1969, the date on which Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong successfully landed on the surface of the Moon via Apollo 11, a lunar lander developed specifically for the mission by NASA.
The USSR tried to replicate what the United States had done, though the government failed several times and eventually gave up on sending a crew to the surface of the Moon with the intention of blasting off of the Moon and back to Earth’s atmosphere. However, the USSR was, in fact, able to be quite active in performing research on space stations that orbited planet Earth.
Since then, governments have all but ignored the possibility of heading to the Moon or elsewhere in space other than the International Space Station. However, it’s clear that China is gearing up to send astronauts to Mars at some point in the future.
Recent news indicates that several dozen Chinese teenagers have been sent to the Gobi desert, a barren stretch of desert in the heart of China, to live in a structure that is intended to simulate the atmosphere and environment on Mars.
The base was built under the engineering and instruction of the Astronauts Center of China and the China Intercontinental Communication Center and cost nearly $7.5 million.
